skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So true.

For example: http://consortiumnews.com/2009/102409b.html

This won't be on the news, yet I bet every American would have a strong opinion (for or against) this practice....but it is not newsworthy. A boy who may (or may not) be floating away in a balloon, however, gets 24x7 coverage.

Whats that saying about something becoming a parody of itself? Thats how I see America today....they have such passionate beliefs about what they are as a people, but their actions are the exact opposite. It's sad...of course, a lot of this has been happening for decades, but what can be pulled off now in the light of day with no public reaction (torture, war crimes, unprecedented financial fraud, etc) is just mind boggling.
Woo Hoo!

We couldn't be happier because we had already integrated Twitter and now know what API's that we can use for our on-line debates!

On-line presence is limited and only static right this second, however, it is our goal that anyone who looks at them will 'get it' (especially our moms). Feedback appreciated.

http://bheardusa.com/

@BHeardusa

#BHeard
Look at how bluetooth connectivity is handled and then tell me that the bump isn't an improvement.

It's a logical action for the result.

I do think it's funny that it requires a net connection and geo-data, though. Very clever on their part to become middleman and privy to all this data. Where's the version that runs over wifi or bluetooth?
No, that's the outbound price, highest tier:

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing
ah right.

that said, it does remove one layer of complexity for the people who just want cloud-based DBs. before now we would have to either sign up with a 3rd party who would pipe data to Amazon, or manually configure EC2 instances - neither of which I particularly wanted to mess with.

I definitely want to give this a whirl.
Job hunting tips for fresh graduates
Very cool. Do you know any good resources on what kinds of algorithms are used?
I'd do it for free, regardless. It's their content after all.

There's a sketch on my notepad here about authenticating 'lost' content. It's not easy and there will be a lot of stuff that needs special casing, but I think it can be done.
Good call on the singularityhub....
What about the acquisition part of it? I'd call that the climax of the story and you left it out...
Heh. I'm assuming your calling black-scholes the lamp post and the more generic technique the alley.

I suppose it comes from having to justify what your doing to higher up managers who don't have the time or inclination to learn something new. I mean, if you can't explain it in 30 sec they won't like it.
May you find what you are looking for – ultimate of three escalating curses. [1]

http://xkcd.com/652/

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_tim...
Rather than merely resolving to overcome the fear, I'd make myself imagine what's supposed to be so bad about the thing I'm afraid of (not being top-.001% gifted? being destroyed by an expert? that both occur in view of others?), and reassure myself that the feared outcome is not actually so terrible.

However, making a public resolution is also a good approach.
You are paying extra for having them handle backups for you.
Why RSA encryption padding is critical (cool RSA implementation flaw)
Antibiotics is sad.

For lasers I'd be willing to bet a bit of confusion (ie yes, lasers are focused waves... See something WAVE, click WAVE).

Overall result is depressing though.
It's been said here many times before: if you are an AWS value-add startup, watch out. Their march up the value chain is relentless.
While it does run as an instance (looks like you don't get shell access), they provide new native API calls for adding and removing nodes on demand, and they will maintain the stack and backups for you. And in the future, API calls for automatically putting replicated DBs across availability zones.

I would be less interested in it if it was not as a standalone instance per customer. Can you imagine having someone with a valid account into a shared MySQL server (and a stolen credit card) poking around all day? (especially on MySQL vulnerability announcement days)
I've had no problems with the Samsung components I've purchased. What kinds of problems with Samsung did you have, or are you just spouting off with no data to back your claim?
Looks to me like the backups are just Elastic Block Store snapshots -- which are available to normal EC2 users just like they are to Amazon RDS users.
"Users don't want all their X "experiences" coupled with their decisions about device and carrier (presuming that everything works together as advertised)"

Isn't that what made the iPhone so popular?
Anything that requires a toolbar installed first does not qualify as 'evil', at worst it qualifies as 'stupid' by the user that knows how to download a toolbar but then doesn't know how to disable it.

linkbait + blogspam = flagged.
When I was eight years old, my father taught me to play Go. My father is terrible at Go, probably the worst player I've ever played. So, I entered college thinking I was fairly good.

I got completely, embarrassingly, destroyed in my first game. And the next two.

After that, I read a book on it, probably the same one the author read (Learn to Play Go by Janice Kim) and didn't really follow at all. Still getting destroyed.

Then I did what the author didn't do: I played at least twenty games of Go a day. I played a Windows program called Igowin, I played a really bad Palm app while standing in lines or on the bus, I played GNU Go on my laptop.

At first I lost every time, then about half the time, then almost never, at which point I played a human again.

And got destroyed, because I had learned tricks to beat the computer, rather than actual good Go techniques.

I guess my point is that this taught me two things: when learning something, there is no substitute for doing it twenty times a day; and that no matter how much you think you have Go figured out, you probably don't.
I would be less interested in it if it was not as a standalone instance per customer.

I absolutely agree. My point was just that this seems to be Amazon wrapping up their existing service in a way which is easier to use and more marketable, rather than actually releasing something new. (Not that there is anything wrong with this, of course -- I'm sure there are many people who don't want to be bothered with figuring out how to get MySQL configured on EC2.)
Acquisition isn't finalized, thats the next part of the story :)
> A few languages do as well...

Specifically?
If you get up to the point where they start charging you .10 outbound, you have already transferred 150TB and been charged $17900

(1st 10TB @ .17 = $1700; next 40TB @ .13 = $5200; next 100TB @ .11 = $11000)
Have you given up on the Baseshield sandbox concept? I don't see it referenced from Ninite (I'm guessing Baseshield isn't complete?)
HBase and Cassandra for Rails - BigRecord
And few of the Ruby programs are re-written for quadcore so:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...

And that PHP :: SBCL webpage has a link to "Overall Performance: PHP is rarely the bottleneck (HTML slides)" ;-)
> As far as speed goes...

But will any of them catch up to JavaScript :-)
Good point, "infinitely" is a bit hyperbolic, "immensely" fits better, I think.

I agree, it is possible to be a professional software engineer without a CS degree (some of the best fit that category), but that's a non-traditional road. More to the point, it's exceedingly rare for someone to intentionally avoid earning a CS degree if they plan, prior to attending college, to become a software developer.
> Instead of focusing so much on standardized testing, we need to start valuing creativity, ingenuity and communication. Just because a school can increase test scores year-over-year, does not mean that the graduating students will make the country more competitive.

The idea that "valuing creativity, ingenuity and communication" more will make the country more competitive is appealing, but how about turning it into a scientific theory. You know, testable and falsifiable.

Failure to take those steps gets us useless twaddle like self-esteem programs.

BTW - If you do succeed, you get to compete with the twaddle for educational resources. Sorry about that.
NASA's Ares I-X: Why Launch Empty $450-Million Rocket?
In my experience, Computer Engineering is a combination of EE and CS, producing someone equally capable (assuming equal interest) of writing low level systems and designing logic circuits.

Software Engineering is more of what Joel is describing, and more schools are starting to offer it as a major, with as much focus going to various project management methodologies as algorithms and data structures.
> It's worth noting that that solution only works if you have much fewer writes than reads, but that's probably true for most people.

Is it true of tweets? How about e-mail? What facebook content works that way? (IIRC the discussion of their new image store, one of the motivations was that most pictures were never viewed.)
I agree - he didn't seem offended to me. As evidence, I remembered yesterday that he actually followed up with a really great comment that I think a lot of folks missed. I'm paraphrasing, but it was something like: "Everyone likes controversial questions and controversial answers, but we don't necessarily learn a lot from them."
nor do they expect to become experts at things while being unwilling to ever do them.

A cursory look at the internet, at geek temperament, or at geeks on the internet will quickly put that assumption to bed.
Yep. That was my point, if you want to get to $.10 you're in the highest tier, so they make you pay through the nose.

And the 150 TB @ $17900 works out to a shade under $.12 / G.

But it doesn't matter which 'tier' you end up in, it's 6 times the going rate, the only advantage is you don't have the write-off on the hardware, that's amazons problem.

But if you push significant bandwidth then that's a minor part of your costs anyway.

I really wonder if there is anybody that does significant bandwidth right now that has their data served from a cloud service and what the rationale is behind that.

Convenience is great, but if it affects your bottom line so strongly then it is probably wiser to do your own thing. Even on leased hardware (such as rackspace or theplanet) you are still off cheaper, a 10MB flat rate machine with a 2GHz cpu, 1G of ram, 2x200G drives sold for $200 / month two years ago. I don't know what the going rate is today but I would expect it to be cheaper.
I've taught Go to over fifty people over the years - and i've seen this over and over again: some people have shaking hands putting down the first stone in their first game ever.

For some reason they assume they ought to be good from the beginning. Even in their first game they try to be original. They're afraid to imitate moves they saw someone else play. It feels like watching someone trying to learn a language by not imitating the sounds they hear when others speak it.

But those that i saw who became really good, were always on the other end of the spectrum. Those who jump right in and played /really/ bad without any anxiety or pressure (no thinking at all and mostly just stubborn imitation of moves they saw someone else play before) and fast (many many many games, often not even to the end), almost always sticked to the game long enough to learn to appreciate and enjoy it, and sometimes even managed to excel at it.

There's something magical about the fearlessness of just playing. Pure curiosity, maybe even quite a bit of ambition, but especially the absolute surrender to repeated and premeditated failure.
Agreed. When I read the headline I nearly creamed my jeans: finally! A scalable database in the cloud! Bring it!

But no, it's just MySQL in the cloud. That's great and all, but it's not going to solve the scalability problems of MySQL.

Does anybody do memcache-in-the-cloud yet?
What an awesome step forward. Just the thought of less and less System/Database Admin stuff, and more time to create apps is very exciting.
I run multiple servers off of rackspace's cloud, at their lowest tier which costs 1.5 cents per hour, or roughly $11.00/mo +bandwidth. It's such a cheap solution and is more than sufficient for the hosting that I use them for. They've surpassed expectations from day one.

Used to use webfaction, which was pretty solid too, but moved away due to some flexibility issues.
I was just thinking about this. Slicehost hasn't changed their prices in the 3ish years we've been with them, but the price of computers and memory has dropped considerably.

As their profit margin expands, I hope Slicehost will lower their prices, too (and if they don't I suspect that'll be a window for someone else).
Google's job is to help you search through the masses of uninteresting stuff and get to the stuff you care about.
I can see why they chose MySQL, but I would gladly pay for Oracle in the cloud as well. Plus, Oracle can scale up to a much bigger machine before you have to start scaling horizontally.
Oh, I agree. There are nice unlimited (NIC saturation at least) deals for both inbound and outbound, you'd be insane to use EC2 for this level of traffic.
URL Shorteners are evil, here's one to prove it.
I am not at the level of Sergey Brin by any means, but if the its parent feeds are given a value based on how many people follow them, relative to others of similar keywords, there would be a mathematical way to filter them.

I could be completely wrong.. but its out there.
Not at all. Coefficient fitting is when you know what output you want, and you have a lot of inputs, and you have some idea of the functional form. In this case, they didn't say "I want to predict the position of the pendulum based on time given these initial conditions." They just said "here is a bunch of data" and it came back with useful equations.
Bill Keller: Apple Tablet 'Impending'
I agree RDS is on the lower end of novelty and excitement... And once you have VMs and a network, what could be considered truly new? Was EBS new? We can create a clustered filesystem with GNBD exports without Amazon's help, too.
Australian Government To Prohibit Infrastructure Competition
love this idea. almost every new social networking idea seems to rely on facebook.
As a former science teacher, this is the sort of thing that really bothers me (no offense to the original poster).

Beyond the basics, people don't need science facts as much as they need science thinking. In other words, we need to be teaching people the philosophy of science: science as a method of acquiring knowledge.

I don't care what you know--tell me why you know it.
take unstructured and imperfect lab measurements from swinging pendulums and mechanical oscillators

To me that indicates that the experimental design wasn't all that great.
First, C++ has MI (which can be used as mixins, although they also give you enough power to shoot yourself in the foot if you so choose) and namespaces. Namespaces and mixins are vital for building large scale software projects. C++ also allows generic programming (via templates).

Java has interfaces and namespaces. Both C++ and Java have static typing, which is a tool for building certain kinds of large scale software projects (dynamic typing -- combined with an actual type system -- as in Python, Ruby or Lisp -- is another tool).

Lastly, Java (as well as PHP) are garbage collector. C and C++ don't -- yet many large scale software projects were created without a garbagage collector. Does this mean that you don't gain a lot of power from a garbage collector?

C++ and Java are not examples of powerful programming languages either. You don't use them because they're the most powerful and elegant programming languages. Typically, they're used out of HR considerations ("it's easy to hire Java programmers"), performance requirements (C++ is fast; properly tuned JVM can be at most 10% behind C for applications which don't require a large heap) or libraries (although availability of other languages on the JVM overrules that argument as well in many cases).

Hate to be blunt, but you're speaking as a Blub Programmer. Sure, you can get things done in PHP (or in Java, or in C++) but there are languages out there with a greater amount of power that you willingly neglect. That's sad.
Since we're talking about Twitter being a "protocol"...Is it likely they will be the only 140 character microblogging platform? What opinions do you have on Status.net and what they are doing with www.identi.ca? I think twitter has created a new protocol, but not a monopoly on that protocol. In 5 years people will be microblogging everywhere. That's what worries me about building something off twitter.
AWS brings so much value to their target space that I'm willing to accept a certain amount of inherent lock-in.

I've honestly never thought this about any other service, and it's a bit disturbing, but in my opinion this reflects their successful march up that value chain.
Haskell: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=pid...

(I am pretty sure GHC uses GMP for its core math routines, though.)
What does that mean?

In particular, what does that mean for everyone's favorite baby Dropbox?
Someone said this before (I don't remember who), but the biggest competition to Windows 7 isn't Apple or Linux, but apathy.

The problem that Microsoft has gotten itself into is that Windows XP is "good enough" for most things, especially in the corporate setting. There just isn't enough "new" to require moving an entire organization to Windows 7 when XP works just fine. The other problem is that computers have gotten to the point where a low-end model is also good enough for most things. A 3-5 year old desktop is still a good machine for most office work. So why would an org buy newer machines to replace ones that work just to run a new version of Windows?

When you talk about moving to Mac OS X or Linux, the scenario above falls apart. Since you're talking about making a major platform shift, there must be a good reason. Perhaps it's support costs. Perhaps it's productivity (perceived or otherwise). Perhaps it's to get the most out of the hardware you already own with minimal software costs.

Once you start to entertain the idea of migrating away from Windows apathy isn't an issue.
Non-english domain name addresses coming to the Internet Oct 30th
They're still growing really fast. Lowering their prices, besides reducing profit, would make them have to work harder at scaling. I don't think they're going to do it until growth levels off.
Tell PG: technical issue with W10 application form
One minor note: the form field for the question about the RFS is a multiple choice one that only allows the choice between the four proposals put out this year. You can't select any of the ideas from last year's “startup ideas we’d like to fund” list and that doesn't fit anywhere else in the form. I'd really like to include that as a reference because I've been tinkering on the same idea since April.

For the record, our answer would've been: "We’re going to attack problem #28 on YC’s 'startup ideas we’d like to fund' list from 2008 – namely mail overload, as well as the related bonus problem of inbox-based todo lists."

Thanks!
How would Postgresql fare?
Not sure that you would want to use any of those three for large-scale development. C and C++ execute quickly at the expense of safety (bad for big apps), and Java is optimized mainly for ease of hiring programmers.

If you want to write clean, large-scale applications, you are going to need abstractions that those languages don't have. (Too bad CL never caught on, that would be perfect for what people use Java and C++ for...)
Graphs of Newspaper Circulation Over the Last Two Decades
It seems to a be a quality control issue. We had 100s of the same model monitor where I used to work. Some of them had the high-frequency whine, some of them didn't.
Perhaps you should brush up on your buzzwords, because you have really eviscerated the meaning from that particular quote.
You can always put that in the answer to "What is your company going to make?"
"We’ll be merging user accounts from RubyForge, so you’ll be able to log into RubyGems.org with your RubyForge login credentials. Your gem ownerships will also be transferred over."

I have gems and and an account on rubyforge.org. Do I get a say in this being replicated? Can I opt out?

Were people with accounts on rubyforge.org notified and asked about this? Maybe I missed the mail, but this is the first I'm hearing about it.

There may be no reason for me to care one way or another, but there's an off-putting aspect to all this that I can't quite put my finger on. It mostly feels like Yet Another Ruby Flavor of the Month, something quietly decided off someplace and then declared as The Way It Is.

That's no doubt unfair to people working on gemcutter, but at one time RAA was the way to go with code, then it was rubyforge.org, then gem hosting on GitHub was teh hawtness, but then suddenly it wasn't, but now we have gemcutter.

I liked the all around ease of github hosting, but with the gem option gone I'm now hosting my own gems, and see less and less reason to count on anyone else for that.

I'll probably now fetch whatever code I have on rubyforge (most of it quite old and near forgotten, with current code hosted elsewhere), delete the projects, and close the account.

Major props to Tom and gang, their efforts made a giant difference to the Ruby crowd, but centralized anything is less and less appealing to me.
There's actually a Go proverb (there are lots of these, and they're quite good!) along the lines of "lose your first 50 games as quickly as possible".

Having said that, I struggled to do this (even against a computer I hated to lose, which impeded my progress for ages).
I'm not sure why they chose MySQL. Does mysql still scale linearly up to 8 cores? I figured most people who need 8 cores for mysql would have already gone to sharding or partitioning.
I'm going to be applying under this. The only problem is that I just left my former startup about a week ago. Looking for someone who would be interested in applying along with myself. Someone who is an awesome developer with a strong machine/statisical learning background prefered. Please e-mail me at kyleATcodeincarnateDOTcom.