skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It looks like Apple's patent's are primarily UI/software related, which in the worst case are relatively easy to workaround.

Nokia's patent's on the other hand are related to wireless technology which are not easily workaround-able, so IMO if this goes towards settlement/cross-licensing Nokia has a much stronger hand.
Eucalyptus Clustering
I tell people I'm a mad scientist.
Ask HN: How to recruit a top notch CTO?
Hi HN,

This isn't intended to be a job advertisement, so I've omitted our company name.

We're a 2 year old company in the social gaming space with 7 figure annual revenue and profitable. Our products and company are growing and we have the opportunity to take it to the next level, but feel we need a stellar CTO/VP Engineering to lead the technology team. One of our technical co-founders fills this role now, but he's better utilized on the business side.

How have you recruited great CTOs for your companies? Have you used head hunters? Are there meet-ups that facilitate this type of high level recruiting?

Please share your thoughts. Cost isn't a factor because we're already profitable, we're really just searching for advice on finding top talent.
Java EE 6 Feature Overview, What every Develoepr should know
Thank you, kindly!
You cross the brilliance threshold when you can get others to buy into your crazy version of reality.
Goldman does have excellent IT vs other big i-banks. (Well, now they're all bank holding companies since they wanted (or were compelled to want, depending on who is telling the story) to gain access to the Fed's discount window.)

But slang, their proprietary language, has a pretty mediocre reputation. Every strat I know there hates it; anecdotal, I know, but still. It is old -- in use for at least 15 years as far as I know -- and cripplingly slow both to develop in and run. From what I hear, where speed matters a fair bit of C++ and even some Erlang (!) are in production use.

Goldman is doing well because it is full of bright people who are very good at their jobs. Last spring/summer/fall, however, Goldman had lost vast piles of money, particularly in their Global Alpha fund. It is true that Goldman had started to go short on housing as early as late 2007; this is why they didn't get pummeled as badly as their big-bank cohorts.[1] The nice rebound is due to a variety of factors, not the least of which is that part about bright people who are good at their jobs, plus a general market rise, plus govt rent seeking (you better believe it), etc.

[1] The mortgage-related products whose implosion wiped out the market and many players are all short-term vehicles. Indeed, the problem was specifically that mortgages were not treated like old school bonds with a long maturity, but that the income stream from these mortgages was sliced and diced into a wide variety of CDOs with a dizzying number of tranches such that they could be securitized and treated as virtually short-term instruments.
The Financial Engine of the Left
Yes, is not so hard to add a few extra lines of code and a couple of fields in the DB, but I think going with an outside comment system makes integration with twitter etc. so much easier and less maintenance in the future.

Thanks for the links, I see you using Kohana, I am still with CodeIgniter on this one - too much down the road to change :)
You make some good points... but that last line was unnecessary flamebait.
> CDs? Maybe to a large degree, but one high-end jazz group I know of just released a new album strictly on CD, because they don't feel that digital distribution options offer enough sound quality.

CD is digital distribution. I grab the CD, copy the bits onto my computer, and place my drink on it and listen to the music.

(idea stolen entirely from the NOFX Coaster album (Music included!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhOY7z2FY3U )

Coasters and Frisbees
Fish lures for deep seas
Mobiles for infants
They make great Christmas tree ornaments

Bring the whole family,
parking is free
You're going to love
our selection
of 8-track tapes,
Blank floppy discs,
mobile car phones,
Atari 2600 consoles

Guard rail reflectors
Hold 'em hand protectors
Halloween handouts
We got a ten-thousand foot warehouse
Full of cassette tapes,
Persimmon woods,
Ink jet printers,
telephone booths,
Sony Walkman's,
Kodak 110's,
Analog TV's,
Betamax's

And 10 million CD's
> Second, people seem to misremember just how crappy Netscape was then. Netscape 4.x was a travesty, it was buggy, slow, and crash-prone. IE 4 really was a better browser at the time (honest).

I'm not one of those people, but the end-result of the Browser Wars, was that once Microsoft won they spent less.. and less.. and less.. resources on Internet Explorer. The entire goal of Internet Explorer was to defeat Netscape so that Netscape Communicator wouldn't overtake Windows as the place to run applications. Bill Gates has openly decried the idea of the browser becoming the operating system (though I don't know about recently).

So Microsoft made a great product, but in the process set back the development of web browsers by years (since their goal -- as I see it -- was to eliminate the competition so that they could steer the market into stagnation).
I think it is true that many people are updating their facebook status from their phones, but I would guess that many of those same people are still going to the website be it to look at photos they have recently been tagged in or play Farmville.

I think the original comment was saying that many people strictly use twitter from their phone or third-party app. There isn't much on twitter that draws an established user to the website like there is with facebook.
Thanks it seems like the consensus to go with Disqus. I wouldn't worry too much about them monetizing the concept at this stage. At worse I will have to just add some more code onto the application!
I whole heartedly disagree with the first part of your statement. I considered me to be a hacker long time before I got called 'hacker' by my peers and clients.

As I already wrote, I do tell some people that I am a hacker. Most of the times this a result of the question: 'So you are a hacker?' After I explained what I do.

Saying you are only a hacker if your peers call you that just raises the mystery around the term hacker.

Last part of your statement I fully agree to. Hacking at first has nothing to do with software or hardware. For me it is using stuff in a way that is was not intent to be used. Being in Africa right now, I see a lot of clever hacks, where people use for example climate control devices to get more or less clean water, reusing garbage to build new stuff and so on.

I am more concerned about the phrase 'expert'. This is imo something you can not label yourself. And even if.. it sounds always kind of strange to me.
Thanks, that's actually what attracted me with a few lines of a script I can have Twitter, Facebook, OpenID and Yahoo!
Don't worry, you'll get very good tidbits from his blog. His books are highly recommended too.
If you look at the source, you can see about 500-1000 words that aren't displayed on the page / doesn't sit well with my "good intentions" meter.
It's not really much of an abstraction. You are still programming SQL, but you spell some things differently.

An abstraction is where you treat the relational data source like something closer to your application; perhaps as a queryable object store. (This is the abstraction that ORMs provide.)
Great post and crash course in long lived HTTP.

Did you write your own http server/library or are you using an existing one for the current Comet implementation?
http://raphaeljs.com/ - these charts look very nice
This saga reminds of Warren Buffet's advice to invest only in businesses that possess "excellent business economics and an outstanding manager."

In my business we've conducted several off-shoring experiments, and they have largely failed to realize a significant return. The lesson I learned from observing and assisting in those experiments is that the secret sauce in business is reputation. Finding people who are honest, reliable, and intelligent can be very difficult. When you find people like that, "grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel." If, like Michael Arrington, you wander into an industry with nothing but your hubris to guide you, you'll most likely be taken for a ride.
Ironically, I was distracted by what I initially assumed was your use of a "frowny-winky" after "prosody."
Build auch a device in A3 format powered by solar energy and come back again when you're done.
The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings
I wrote assembler code for my HP48 on paper well before I typed it into the device when I was doing anything remotely complex.

I wonder if I'm missing anything by starting in a text editor these days...
Just thought I'd add +1 for Intense Debate. We've used it on our site's blog for a little over a year and we're quite satisfied.
Wow, just wow. Talk about slanted reporting. First, let me just quote one line from the video. "When it comes to any kind of financial scam, like sub-prime mortgages..." Uh, what? Sub-prime mortgages aren't a scam at all. Were they risky? Yes. Were they a scam or illegal? No. Were they securitized in a manner that distorted their value? Maybe. That has nothing to do with the underlying mortgage itself, and really is more reliant on interactions between banks, credit rating agencies, and shadow bank counterparties. This video loses all credibility to me at that point. The cap and trade is not a financial "scam." Yes, there are incentives that are given out to get people to sign on to the system. Yes, the incentives suck. Yes, it would be great if there would be a better way to get all countries to sign on. A carbon tax is one option, but there too we will need to add a ridiculous list of compromises to get countries like china or india to sign on. In absence of a better alternative, the cap and trade is a start. Details will need to be worked out, and some incentives may fall by the way side. The important thing however, is to do SOMETHING, and it is my opinion that this is the best option available at this time.
Compared to what most of the kids his age were probably doing? I'm impressed.
I think they should also credit RedBox for the decrease in rental stores. There are a lot of people out there who use it, either because they aren't internet-savvy or for other reasons.

As for faxing, I sadly encounter way too many occasions where it is still used.

Here's hoping that in the next decade, we'll see a drastic improvement of local governments posting things online. I just received a letter stating that unspecified changes were being made to a the zoning codes of a district only referred to as a number, specifically in regards to areas zoned as one of two different two-letter abbreviations. For full text, I have to go to city hall. They might as well have printed it on Vogon letterhead
Well, it certainly isn't impossible. As a matter of fact, I'd argue the opposite - that it's impossible to really learn anything without being inspired and motivated. I know the only times I've really learned things is during bouts of excitement, and the smartest people I know just get excited very easily :)

Sure, some people go through learning motivated by impressing their peers or satisfying their parents/teachers/bosses. But they're not really learning in the true way, now are they?
I still buy CDs, even though I rip them immediately. Why?

1) I like getting booklets with lyrics
2) I can re-rip anytime with higher quality or a different format
3) The CD gets stored safely as a backup

If all digital music were sold in a lossless, DRM-free format, and included excellent digital booklets, and I had an easy and good backup strategy, I guess I'd stop buying CDs. But that day hasn't quite arrived for me.
ECMAScript 5 released
Engineering & operations - one task tool that fits them all
is there a tool that enables engineering groups and operations groups to work in unison i.e. bugzilla is for bug tracking as ? is for operations teams in cloud solutions. Is Pivotabletracker applicable to both engineering & operations groups?
According to Wikipedia :-), the first browser that supported a tab UI was InternetWorks by BookLink.
If batch programming had not existed long before, he would have reinvented it. :-)

Heck, my first exposure to programming was by way of a textbook that used a nonexistant decimal machine's assembler; presumably I could have submitted my code to a simulator had I been attending the right college, but I was only in seventh grade at the time.

Show of hands: who hasn't ever played computer with their code?
Some salient and insightful points - but hard to reach because of all of the shameless anti-geek stereotyping (coming from an alleged geek no less).

Protip: When trying to convince a bunch of programmers that you're right, painting them with a broad, stereotypical brush is generally not helpful to your cause, like:

"But only stupid people fall for marketing"

"Please tattoo your name in binary on your forehead. It would make social interaction ever so much more functional."

"I failed Art class because my teacher took exception to me pointing out that her grading formula was calculated incorrectly!"

"Geeks tend to think that marketing is nothing but deception."

... etc. I've met very few people, computer geek or otherwise, who actually think/talk like this. By filling your article with caricatures and stereotypes like these, you're simply reducing the ability for people to identify with it (not to mention being insulting to the reader's intelligence).

There are some good insights in the article - but I do not think these points are as mind-shattering to the average geek as the author seems to believe. Marketing is not intrisically scummy and scammy? You don't say! Marketing need not be deceptive? What a concept! Marketing can be honest about its products? Woaaaaaah, duuude.
Epic comment.

grellas +++
Where is there concrete evidence that a significant chunk of Twitter users use 3rd party apps?

Desktop apps have horrible conversion rates, and I don't see why Twitter apps in particular have any reason to buck this trend. Whenever there are articles like these about Twitter's traffic numbers, people always bring up 3rd party app traffic making up the difference, but nobody ever provides any references to back that up.
It wasn't a commentary on Apple's investigations. It was a commentary on the lack of foresight in your scheme.

I see your point though. Tracing IP addresses through an ISP's DHCP is probably way too complicated and expensive for a little fly-by-night operation like Apple. They wouldn't have any pull with Comcast.

(Hmmm, your "clever" rejoinder has a few problems of its own. Left as an exercise. Take some advice: Keep your day job. Planning heists doesn't seem to be your strong point.)
Maxwell's equations of software
Added a link with more RAID6 info and a diagram.

Speeds can go up to 100mbps, but it varies based on how busy the server is, distance between your server and RB servers. You can ping bishop.royalbackup.com to get a rough idea of latency.
Rise of sea levels is 'the greatest lie ever told'
See Phillip's response for a bit more explanation in the mail thread:

http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=125309001007725&w...

At my (soon-to-be-last) company, emarsys, Linbit maintained our production clusters. We had a couple of Postgres servers and main file storage replicated across physical locations - a customer requirement, actually, that the system be capable of handling something like a fire at one of the data centers.

Overall, it worked well. In the 2.5 years I was there, the only time I needed a backup was to restore my own mistake. :)

I'd check it out if you're looking for a more complete replication system (Again, not RAID.)
Wonderful example on how to turn an hack (poking inside the memory to insert a trampoline) into a working useful product.

EDIT: btw it should be possible to do the trick even in 90% of stripped binaries. Just calculate the right offsets offline and if the bin is stripped try this binary against a table (consisting of offsets -> first N bytes of "famous" binaries). So at least it's possible to add support for "notable" stripped binaries like mac os x default ruby install, debian, ubuntu, and so forth.
If I recall correctly, RENUMBER only renumbered lines, but not the GOTO and GOSUB labels, so it was pretty useless after all :)

The best thing you could do was to stick to the practice of labeling by multiples of ten, and if you needed to hack something, you could still do it in one or two lines.

But basically programming in BASIC was hacking :)
What caused the ice ages - Google Search
++ on "expert"

But seriously, it seems "hacker" is thrown in self-reference too much. While anyone can do something clever to perform "a hack," to actually be a "hacker" takes a mind-set, not an accomplishment.

People can become hackers by taking on that mind-set, and they may very well be a tenable hacker without having been gifted the label by another.

I'll agree with many other comments though, in saying that "hacker" is a label that should only be used among folks who you are relatively certain already understand the concept. Example: Calling yourself a hacker over a business lunch with non-technical investors? Bad idea. Always. Even if you really are one.

Either way, critical thinkers should be able to condense their function to a single sentence without pulling out stigma-laden memes. They should also recognize that "What do you do?" deserves a response more four words long.
Family Continues Cancer Patient's Legacy
"Also, I'm surprised they missed CRTs. That's a pretty big change that's affected huge numbers of people."

Amen. It always amazed me how many people ran their CRT at 60 Hz. Even today's cheapest LCD is an ergonomic achievement compared to what most people used ten years ago.
Anyone??
Isn't part of the issue at hand that the extensibility of Firefox is deep, while that of Chrome is shallow(er)? I understand that deep extensibility isn't necessarily a cause for memory leaks, the ongoing inheritance of a community making use of that deep extensibility can limit

Also, I personally haven't been exposed to any evidence regarding the existence of memory leaks in a Firefox install with no extensions. Many people have anecdotal evidence of their issues with memory leaks, but I never see a corresponding claim for having no extensions installed.

Of course that point is also anecdotal.
Apple’s Next Media Frontier Will Be Streaming Video
2010: What's in Store? {video}
And 10 million CD's

Sigh. Add "proper punctuation" to that obsolete list. (The article is guilty as well.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_&_Leaves
http://apps.facebook.com/starfleet_commander
Thanks, that's really interesting.

I have been playing with web workers (http://github.com/revis/Really-Cloudy) and one thing that worried me was the number of people with capable browsers. From your data it looks like that isn't a problem for technical audiences.
Google developed Chrome because making the web as a viable application platform is in their best interest. They tried working with Mozilla for Firefox 2 development, but realized that Mozilla is a dysfunctional project with questionable leadership and insular development practices, so working with them really wasn't tenable. Hence, Chrome.

And honestly, process-per-tab, a proper security model, and plugins running as a separate process so the buggy Flash plugin doesn't bring down your browser are things that Firefox is considering copying from Chrome, not the other way around.
I wrote one in Java/NIO. It runs in a single thread, does SSL, async DNS lookups, proxying, comet, websocket.

I really hope someday to open source it sometime. If only to show people that development in Java doesn't have to be horrible.
http://blog.programmableweb.com/2007/09/10/twitter-api-traff...
The blog is powered by an unfeatures list - and is ugly and lacks the basic things that every wordpress blog has? Features are put in software because people pay money for them. If nobody added anything to software, or let software evolve at the pace 37signals software evolved at, we'd be using Windows 3.15 by now, maybe.

All those tens of thousands of companies making money by adding new features that people want to software are not idiots. It's not that they have failed to ever consider Jasons theory. They have, and it does not make them money. People want features. People will pay for features.

That "blog software" that powers your blog - I would not use it. It looks like it sucks. I'd use wordpress, because it has a great many features that I need, and that developed because people like me need them.

You want to believe that features are unimportant, simply because you don't have the time or resources to develop new edge features. People who actually sell software will tell you the exact opposite though - features and upgrades are what sell.
Old Hard Drives Get Sculpted Into Cars, Bikes, Robots
Boeing's 787 Dreamliner to Make First Flight Next Week
I wasn't aware that the waterfall was really a "method" at all, much less something that was taught. I thought it was an observation or model of the sequential process that tends to spring up once you have specialized groups within an organization. It's not exactly the absence of a development methodology, but the process (if not the term) predates the idea of development methodologies as a topic of concern.
I think that's because steadicat built the site as a single page. The words you're talking about are anchored at #faq, #terms, etc. right?
TC articles have been killed before.
Extension:Lua - MediaWiki
That's raw API traffic, not user numbers.

An app that polls Twitter every minute is of course going to generate a lot of requests. But if only 10% of Twitter users use 3rd party apps, the web metrics are still more meaningful than API use.
Why did you change the title when posting it here. Odd choice of wording...
My primary email account is a part of paid web hosting service, so, in some sense, I do pay for my email account, even nowadays. I also don't remember email account as a separate service.
I tested various NoSQL solutions including CouchDB for my research work. It was the most pleasurable to work with, but by far the slowest. Bulk inserts weren't an option for me, so I had to insert each document one at a time. Insertion time averaged at ~2.5 seconds(!) These documents were very small, and the insert operations were single-threaded, so the write lock wasn't an issue. Compare this with ~150 microseconds on the datastore I implemented instead, or (from what I remember) even better performance on Tokyo Tyrant.

I used CouchDBX on a MacBook laptop with no adjusted settings. Something must have been off, but after reading so many articles talking about how alpha the product was and hitting these insane performance limitations, I wasn't willing to venture any further in experimenting with it.

Take a look at this also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=942810

CouchDB is conceptually promising (especially when combined with HTML5 - that's an awesome solution waiting to happen) but its performance is crippling IMO. I can't wait until the team starts focusing on performance tuning. Perhaps then we'll see a very practical and useful datastore.
Theory P: The Philosophy of Managing Programmers (*not* a parody)
My predictions, in haiku:

Life on Europa,
And then Jupiter fuses.
Who saw *this* coming?
If you look at Chrome and all you see is yet-another-tabbed-browser then I question whether or not Hacker News is the correct community for you to hang out in.

Ironic, since indiejade has been here about 10x as long as you. Perhaps if you can't stick to the issues and avoid childish flamebait like that, this isn't really the community for you.

(And yes, I'm aware of the irony)
Is it SuperAudio CD or something? Do they realize that there is such a thing as FLAC?

I mean, I'd figure if they were real snobs they'd do a vinyl only pressing.