skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good article. I get a lot of interesting information from following a small number of technical blogs of people I know (usually just through years of email contact) and trust. That is how I get valuable/interesting things to read. (I also use twitter for this purpose.)

Redit (hint: strong customize the 'My Redit' lists you subscribe to narrow things down to your particular interests) and Hacker News are also pretty good if you stick to the first few pages of up-voted links.

re: search engines: one of my primary uses for web search is pasting in error messages from server build errors, runtime errors, etc. Also, for quickly looking up an API I can't quite remember. A very different process than using search to find fun stuff to read.
Ask HN:  Singularity Univ. Worth The $25K Tuition?
You have to pay $30 to upload your CV?! Why would anyone ever pay to get a job?
Pasadena Computer Repair Services
Your computer network is vital to your business. When problems happen, you need a computer repair company with a fast response time. In addition to traditional wired networks, our technicians are experts at installing, configuring, and securing wireless networks
It was in his stackoverflow profile right? So I guess it's a safe bet that it's his. Plus the description sounds like him.
I recognize Jon Skeet, Quassnoi, Alex Martelli and cletus... but I know them all from Stack Overflow. I wouldn't say all of those people are famous anywhere in particular other than there?
Maybe it is just the ex- raid leader in me, but I've often thought of the day job and business as games with paychecks attached. Sometimes it even feels like I'm playing them -- particularly when checking my analytics stats. (I've had a lot of fun playing Spreadsheets In Space with worse visualization than my stats pages.)

I've resisted the urge to build actual game mechanics into my business for fear of what it would do to my social life. (It wouldn't be too hard -- make a quick Rails plugin to duplicate the Stack Overflow badges functionality, add a few hooks into my pre-existing stats code, maybe add a post-commit hook to... NO, NO, NOT GOING TO DO IT. But dang if the gamer in me doesn't see every problem and start thinking of ways to kill the dragon... preferably ridiculously efficient ways of killing the dragon without all the work that the designers intended me to go through.)
I'm actually impressed that they get away with running a site with so much traffic on such minimal hardware. Almost an argument against the cloud/NoSQL/scale-out trends :)
Use submitted for that. i.e. http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=rythie
Let's presume there's no distribution involved, though—that the "paper" is something you receive on your Kindle at 6PM sharp. The dynamics seem more forgiving then.
Hasn't anyone noticed that many Facebook users will friend everyone and anyone who asks? This suggests to me that they either do not care about privacy much or, more likely, don't use Facebook status updates for intensely private information.
You ARE a marketer. Deal with it.
Isla de Chiloe travel, Isla de Chiloe hotels transportation
VOIP Advantages
Are you thinking of switching from your regular phone to VOIP? Are you not sure whether switching to VOIP will be a wise choice or a prudent move? Yes, it is good to review the pros and cons of the new option that you would like to switch to before you disturb the current set up so that you do not regret at a later stage. However, when it comes to switching from your regular phones to VOIP
Also, does this business model survive in a half-decent economy.

I doubt it.

Quality will beat quantity.
shouldn't there be two massive bubbles for bear sterns and lehman brothers?

the only reason i can think of for not seeing them is that maybe they weren't counted as full "failures" since some of their assets were bought, but it would make sense to include them in something like this..
Nice article. I especially like the attitude of the author: "One barrier I have encountered is that there is a bias against BI efforts that require 'programming.'"
IIRC the figures on TMI (not broken down into phantom per-capita exposures but to the environment) included millions of Curies released into the environment. Some credible researchers have found evidence that figure may be 10 to 100 times too small.

Not surprising; with all the money involved, the science gets 'adjusted'. The industry can afford the best PR.
Click on I am Feeling Lucky with an empty search string
The problem is very definitely real. "Helpful" comparison and review sites come up far too often, filled to the brim with affiliate links and, if you're lucky, excerpts from and links to reviews only tangentially related to the product at hand, when you go searching for a product that doesn't have dominant niche sites.

And I don't see how Kedrosky is a black pot in this case. He is not a search engine, nor is he a spammer, nor a purveyor of affiliate-linking review sites.
Yeah, I think it's clear that friend lists are public information (unless that's not what you're getting at). The discussion was whether this should be the case.
ivan has been around this community for quite a while- he was one of the people who built tipjoy, and his move to facebook was much discussed. perhaps he assumed people would know.

Also, clicking on his username indicates this clearly (at least now).
Amazon Introduces Bidding for CPU Time (Spot Instances)
How to avoid being fooled by a menu
Provocative article. Really solid advice to write 1000 words about a belief. Too bad he starts with such a sexist preamble.
Salman Khan, math master of the Internet
I don't 'stomach' higher math (experimentalist), but thought Hofstadter did a good job in "Godel, Escher, Bach".

http://geb.stenius.org/
I'm not sure if greasemonkey scripts have access to header information but if they do that might be one way to solve this for you.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/34231
Google: Designs, Lessons and Advice from Building Large Distributed Systems
That is a good point that is often overlooked. If you're willing to maintain your own servers, you can get _much_ better bang for the buck than leasing them from Amazon (and way better IO performance which matters a lot for your DB).

I sometimes feel like there's two types of people interested in the NoSQL stuff:

1. People building internet scale sites (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc)

2. People who don't know how to optimize their database.

But maybe I'm just cynical. :)
One thing that I have noticed about slicehosts articles is that they really just cater to two markets, the rails market and the php market and what they do is lump rails/nginx together and php/apache together.

While this is generally okay they really don't need 7 different articles on how to configure Ubuntu 8.04 9.04 9.10 and Debian to do the same thing, linode at least dumps ubuntu and debian together.
That is a good list! Good idea "using SimpleDB for dumping a lot of important metrics data" and reminded me to install webrat, which I just did (people at a Merb Camp were raving about webrat) and from the github doc page, it looks like a good and easy way to sanity check that web apps are not broken.
How Moo Got It Right & Became Profitable – GigaOM
Can't you just cancel your direct deposit and have that giddy check-in-hand feeling when your paycheck comes in the mail?
Don’t Badger Your Customers (and, Make Better Surveys)
Wait, it's very easy to borrow at short term rates (3M LIBOR) and then receive fixed long term rates (30 Years). It's called an interest rate swap.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interest_rate_swap

And no, simply receiving on 30Y swaps is not a sure path to money. Sure you will probably pick up carry in the first year or so, but eventually you need to get out of the trade (or take on the risk for 30 years), and if LIBOR / Treasuries sell off you'll have to pay a hefty amount to unwind.
Alex Martelli I recognise; he's a python guru (behind the Python Cookbook, among other things) now working at google. There's a couple of excellent tech-talks on (mostly) advanced python by him that are well worth watching if you use python at all.
Here's an idea for a one-time stimulus: legalize drugs and offer amnesty to drug dealers who put their money in the bank. No questions asked, you can bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash and open a bank account today.
I personally find scheme to be the simplest Lisp to learn (after working with Common Lisp, Clojure and Scheme). If you do want to learn scheme, I found the MIT lectures http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute... brilliant and the little schemer http://www.amazon.com/Little-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/02... a lot of fun as well.
Ideas for machine learning & computer vision projects
This was a suggestion list for a one-quarter course in learning & vision projects. It was compiled by Prof. Serge Belongie of UCSD, who started a fingerprint recognition startup while still an undergraduate at Caltech.
I think the per-capita exposures figure was simply to give a sense of scale not to obscure the figures. Do you have a source that backs that claim?
Clojure, Crane, Incanter, Leiningen.

Magic music to my ears, I have no idea why.
Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours - Noam Chomsky
You're not paying to get a job, you're paying to have your CV seen by employers, which is a heck of a lot less :-)

Having a small barrier to listing a CV ensures that most CVs in the system represent people who are genuinely interested in finding a job and actually have the confidence that they are moderately qualified.

If you've ever been on the employer side, and looked at the resumes you get when you put an open job listing on a high traffic site like monster.com, you get enormous piles of junk, people that are completely unqualified. Our theory is that having 5 qualified candidates is better than having, say, 10 qualified candidates in a pile of 300, both for the employer AND for the employee who would rather be in the smaller pile.

In any case, $29 is a tiny amount. You'll spend a lot more than that on the haircut you get the day before your interview.
No. The people who friend everybody are not real Facebook users. They are generally older people, already out of college/grad school who are unable to build a true network of acquaintances on Facebook and are just on Facebook to feel as though they are participating in social networking. Twitter is a more suitable option for these people because it doesn't require any genuine social interaction. Real Facebook users have hundreds of photos and thousands of wall posts accumulated throughout the years (of college). For them a Facebook account is actually an online profile of their actual lives. Most will want to keep this private.

And nobody cares about status updates. They're generally just an inane sentence about whatever you're doing. But isn't that all Twitter is? YES! Twitter's entire function is just a minor feature on Facebook. But remember, Twitter's purpose is to allow old people who can't make a real social network to delude themselves into think that they're on the cutting edge of technology.
Here is a direct link to his webpage
http://www.khanacademy.org/
he seems to have quite a variety of subjects
Everybody wants to believe their site is going to be The Next Twitter, and as good engineers, they believe that they should build it super-duper-scalable from the beginning so they don't have to re-architect it if it really does take off.

Pragmatically, 99.99% of startups don't become Twitter and will manage fine with one DB server and one web server, especially if you use a compiled language and a commercial-grade database and nice hardware. And even if you become Twitter, well, they had terrible scaling problems, and it doesn't seem to have hurt them one bit.
So politicians in the past were more informed because they had an easier time informing themselves. Those capable of being more well-rounded may have found politics to be a better fit since it was still manageable at that time. But now with more advancements in every specific area, it's harder to be well-rounded and perfectly up-to-date. So politicians nowadays cannot keep up and become more educated on issues because it requires more effort to thoroughly understand diverse topics. Is that what he meant?
To paraphrase Spolsky: users don't read dialog boxes. Especially verbose dialog boxes.

As for me, yet another reason I don't have a Facebook account.

As for everyone else, assume that anything you put on-line will eventually (if not immediately) become public forever.
The standard is definitely to have the employer pay, but technically they'll just have less to pay you with after paying the finder fees. So, in a way, you're still paying with a head hunter.
This is a wealth of info for a newbie linux vps-admin like myself. Awesome awesome awesome.
Data Monday: American Information Consumption
The rapid-fire criticism/defense of every Joel-related article on HN makes me wish I had access to such helpful critics.
To butcher Hanlon's razor - "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by bugs".
e.g. A bunch of people debate "rationality" using a few "priors" based on flimsy evidence from the internet. Just because you can use Bayesian nomenclature to snow others, doesn't make it rational. This whole thing hinges on the priors, and the author has given very weak evidence for them.
There is always some guy, I've never heard of, being an asshole on any given topic on the Internet. I'm sorry that he's picking on John/jQuery but it's really not that surprising.

I think John is being pretty pragmatic though just to exorcise the whole deal and attempt to enforce a clean room environment for the affected code branches.
The Race Towards A Relevant Real-Time
This is a special case of the "they don't make things like they used to" fallacy. You only see the old stuff that was so exceptionally well-made that it survived.
As I recall, wet and dry storage are not mutually exclusive. The usual scheme is to let the waste sit in wet storage until the shorter-lived isotopes have decayed away and the waste has become cool enough to move to dry cask storage.
I was also using it since mygwt. But they did a "bait and switch" when they moved to ext; I lost months of work.
Here is the actual David Mark post in question: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.javascript/msg/071f...
You're idiots for using javascript at all.
I agree that a physics PhD + JD or MBA degree is very valuable, probably more valuable than the JD or MBA alone, but does it overcome the opportunity cost? We're talking 7+ years of lost income, plus the possibility of extra student debt.
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Microsoft Solver Foundation
Obama's Big Sellout
has anyone used R for non-math projects? it has some very interesting features but i'm not sure how well it would hold up for large projects, complicated data structures, etc.
Ha! I had the exact same thought. The Economist is weekly, and sounds like what he's suggesting, sans comics and crossword puzzle.
In the case of TMI, the steam formation did slow down the reaction -- just not enough to prevent damage to the fuel rods. Of course, the reactor's pressure vessel acted as a passive heat sink once the fuel melted and easily prevented the fuel from escaping, but it was still costly and scary, and the response of the operators at the time can only be called a ridiculous clusterfuck.

This sort of thing is why I really like pebble bed reactors: you can just shut off the coolant and walk away, and they'll sit tight. (The operators of China's HTR-10 research reactor actually do this.) Everything is designed to withstand the maximum temperatures they could possibly achieve. Light water reactors have an impressive safety record, and the modern versions aren't susceptible to the problems that led to TMI, but inherently self-moderating reactors are just really aesthetically pleasant.
Ooh ooh! Utility CPU futures, anyone?
Except that often doesn't happen. I'm being paid hourly right now and I do find it has some advantages: I hardly ever am asked to work more than 40 hours a week because I would have to be paid overtime; If I need to leave work early there's no guilty feeling of needing to "make up the time"; I'm never "on call" at night or on weekends for support--the salaried folks get that joy.
You might want to experiment for an hour or so with DrScheme/MzScheme: lots of good libraries for web app development -- same comment applies to Chicken Scheme.

My favorite Scheme is Gambit-C which has fewer libraries but if you install from source, then look in the examples directory for a simple HTTP server example.

That said, DrScheme would be a fast way to evaluate Scheme for your purposes.
The "flimsy evidence from the internet" is the same or perhaps more complete than the courtroom evidence.
It's not a page devoid of margins. Pages that actually have no margins are difficult to read.

Although, maybe if you prefer narrow column widths, you should resize your browser window. And while you're at it, help convince those web developers that required 1024+ pixel widths on pages are counterproductive.
In the case of liquid fluoride thorium reactors, I don't think the xenon-135 is what you need to be worrying about; worry about the fluorine gas instead! It's very reactive. Xenon, on the other hand, is chemically stable because it's a noble gas. And it's larger than helium, so it's easier to contain.

Also, I'd like to point out that pebble-bed reactors, while usually cooled with helium, could also be cooled with nitrogen that we just pull out of the air. It's more reactive than helium and it forms carbon-14 when you expose it to neutron flux, but those issues are both fairly minor. I think they're going with helium now because they want to get something working as quickly as they can, and they don't want to go mucking with what works.
As your comment here is generally well informed I'd be chuffed if you elaborated.

edit: genuine compliment, but i'm not crawling.
We can use the U-238 in breeder reactors. Or make a subcritical blanket of U-238 and some of the longer-lived radioactive elements in spent fuel rods, and put them around a fusion reactor. The fusion reactor doesn't have to generate a net positive amount of usable energy; it just has to provide a lot of neutrons, which it does. This is the basis for fusion-fission hybrid systems, which can be marketed as nuclear-waste annihilation systems.
Haven't you ever had wordless thoughts?

I often find that wordless thoughts are much more efficient to work with mentally than wordy ones. When you need to communicate, or the thought is intricate or important enough to require a deliberate fleshing out, THEN you write.

Here's an example of a wordless thought: you see a figure that is almost symmetrical and you consider why it isn't exactly symmetrical. It's possible to do this consideration without wording your thought - the reason for asymmetry exists in a wordless form in your mind.

Here's another: you're sitting and you suddenly want to pee. You just get up, go to the bathroom, and pee. The idea of peeing is definitely in your mind when you go to the bathroom - it's rarely explicitly worded out.

Yet another: when you're doing minor re-factoring to your code, much of your thoughts are actually wordless.

I'll appropriate a term from psychology for the process of converting wordless thoughts to wordy ones: focusing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focusing). Wordless thoughts are basically purely experiential in nature. Wordy ones are deliberate, analytical, and well, wordy. Focusing is the process of converting the former to the latter. You hold the wordless thought in your mind's eye and deliberately covert it into a verbal form.

I am of the opinion that much of philosophy is simply converting wordless thoughts to wordy ones - just as artists are experts in drawing what they see, philosophers are experts in focusing.

My yet another hunch is that experts often think wordlessly about matters their field. It's just too inefficient to word out every thought process.
Pebble beds are also compatible with thorium, in case anybody was wondering.
Are you guys still in BizSpark, btw?
I spent $14 for a haircut a few days before my last interview a few weeks ago. It didn't help. I should have spent that money playing craps ;)
A Look Inside Pixar Studios
It's indistinguishable from what a pennies-per-paragraph SEO contractor might write, just excerpting and summarizing arbitrary reviews from other sources, chiefly as crawler-fodder.

It might be a wise synthesis of key points from many other reviews... but it'd take a while to earn that reputation as a trusted voice. In the meantime, its design is not giving me signals of reliability, though I can see it has those aspirations (from its 'about' page).

If it were signed copy, more clearly dated, with some quantitative indicators they'd done deeper research, it'd come closer to impressive for me. But, then the source sites might object about the quantity of material excepted.

How valuable is a review-of-reviews, by an unnamed someone who hasn't themselves ever tried the product?

I could believe that done right the review-of-reviews approach could theoretically provide some value. But it veers so close to pay-for-keyword-stuffed-article index-chaffing behavior my presumption starts out against it.
I think they are only including banks that deal with the general public. Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers are investment banks.
The whole thing doesn't hinge on the priors: the priors should be rather easy to agree to (i.e., the observable rate at which the general population in Amanda Knox's relative bucket commit murders). The author's entire point is that all of the evidence presented against Ms Knox is irrelevant because the bar for it to be incriminating is way high given the evidence against Guede (and it doesn't meet that bar).
It is great for drawing vector graphics. It also has capabilities for working with large data sets, as long as you don't do it the naive way (by reading a huge array into memory).
New Google Easter Egg (Click I'm feeling lucky with an empty box)
Click I'm feeling lucky with an empty box
"best way to provide utility to the user" in aggregate only. For those who want privacy, what existed was just fine. Same as 'obvious features that would be bettered". Twitter defaults to everything-open and we all knew that from day 1. Facebook keeps trying to "increase utility" for me. I don't want that - I just want to share info with my friends. MySpace has maximum utility because any pr0n star can friend you. Do not want.

The article doesn't say EULA's are cheating you, it says that Facebook is destroying the trust users have that most sites will treat your privacy carefully.
The line spacing is the default one presented by your browser; if you find fault with the line-spacing, you're finding fault with your browser preferences.

And margins are generally no good. Depending on how they're effected, what margins do is perhaps make the page more attractive for those running their browser at fullscreen, while screwing over everyone doing the appropriate thing, which is to keep the window opened at the user's desired size for reading. This is because they are either implemented as a) a centered, fixed-width column that invokes horizontal scroll bars for those whose preferred size is smaller than required by the layout (usually no less than 850 pixels these days), or b) fixed margins so that, e.g., a 640 pixel wide viewport on a page with 200+ pixel margins reduces the effective column width to less than 250 pixels.

As for pretension, I agree, although it doesn't originate from the likes of Crockford, but instead those uncompromising fucks who find their "artistic vision" for a website to be of greater importance than their employers' content.