skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the ones that are relieved to know that the LHC didn't cause the armagedon, I must tell you that we are in the parallel universe that survived. At most one of our parallel universe was obliterated.

Don't beleive the no parallel universes were damaged during the LHC's collisions sticker you can see at CERN laboratories.
I've always been interested in truly alternative captcha designs. I like the "math problem" idea or even something crazier like reading the time of an analog clock?
In OS X from 10.5 on, the Help menu has a quick search box (command-shift-/ aka command-?) that works somewhat like this. I find it most useful in programs like Photoshop which I don't use enough to memorize the menu layout, but enough to where I know approximately the name of the menu command I need.
"supercool school"?? hmm, try saying that three times quickly!
Heck if you have a recent gnu xargs you can add -P n and xargs will split the list out n ways and run them in parallel. Sort of like the first step of a poor-man's mapreduce.

Reduce, on the other hand, is a pain; a simple > $$.out or similar on the xargs commandline probably won't work, best to wrap it up in a standalone script that does the same thing to guarantee you've got a new pid.

Then you get something like:

$ cat batch.sh
#!/usr/bin/sh
do_something_expensive $1 > tmp_$$.out
$ find -print0 | xargs -n 1 -0 -I{} -P 4 bash ./batch.sh {} && cat tmp*out > batch.out && rm -rf tmp*out

Of course this is huge overkill for nearly all jobs unless you have a good number of CPUs and even then you should probably find a better way if you find yourself doing this twice.
Actually, given improvements in threading, NIO doesn't give faster socket throughput in typical many-connection servers. See:

http://paultyma.blogspot.com/2008/03/writing-java-multithrea...
"Cloud computing" is a lot like "Web 2.0" -- it is a buzzword that has an unstable definition and is very, very broad for a professional specialty.

Do you mean "cloud computing" like building web applications which store their data on a server rather than storing it on the client like a traditional desktop app? In that case, build web applications. A short, short list of skills to cover includes HTML, CSS, Javascript, SQL, and your server-side language/framework of choice. I like Rails.

Do you mean "cloud computing" like running massively parallel calculations across a fleet of machines? In that case, Hadoop is a decent place to cut your teeth. (It is much, much easier to play with than things were a few short years ago when then-employer got the "grid computing" bug. The buzzwords change, the buzzwords remain the same...) As for actually having a cloud, well, you don't really need one. A cloud of 1 instance is enough for you to play with the APIs and concepts. Abstracting away the number of instances you have is a major portion of why the techniques work, after all. Alternatively, you can run multiple VMs on one physical machine. (Or, use Amazon or what have you and rent a half-dozen instances for an hour or two at a time.)

Or do you mean "cloud computing" like "on-demand resource scaling"? In that case, I'd pick your favorite vendor (Microsoft is coming out with Azure, Amazon has S3/EC2/etc) and getting familiar with their APIs, limitations, and how you would actually use them to deliver value.

Incidentally, that's the big thing to concentrate on. Toy problems are lovely -- for example, you can calculate solutions to n-queens all day long on your cloud, and that is a good exercise for figuring out the nuts and bolts of how to parallelize a calculation. However, sooner or later you want to be able to do something which actually has value to someone. N-queens does not. You'll find that it is much harder to so something valuable than it is to just run a calculation on a fleet of machines. (There is no push-button API for "do stuff customers find useful", but that is eventually where you want to be.)
I wonder if a Firefox plugin could have a list of shopping aggregator sites (like Bing and google shopping) and automatically block referrers when using outgoing links from them, and maybe specially treat cookies being set by the sites those links land on?
Open Sourcing the Global Warming Debate
Recurring subscription fees are also at the core of the "Free CD of 5 ways to do X better if you pay S&H web sites".

1. Enter email to see video of "My top tip for doing X better"

2. Person who enters email gets offer to get CD of all of the tips (for S&H only)

3. The shady part here is by paying S&H with their credit card they click through on an agreement to be billed monthly for $Y if they do not cancel

4. A percentage of people do not cancel (possibly because they want new tips on how to do X better). This creates a monthly, recurring revenue stream.

It seems very successful:

http://www.microcontinuity.com/download/im-myth_micro.pdf

I recall reading a book once where an AOL exec boasted they could probably put a popup-ad that said "Click here to pay $5 for absolutely nothing" and they would get clicks from their subscriber base.
But it sounds like part of the deal was that he would have an online presence.
Transfer between S3 and your Heroku app (which lives inside EC2) is free.
Workers stealing data for competitive edge
Can I please be allowed to vote
My votes don't count. Can I please vote again?
We aren't planning to provide any additional types of file storage, as we don't believe that the local file system should be used at all in a scalable app, as it creates state at the app server.

We do provide access to /tmp if you need scratch file space for processing (it is not persistent between requests). More info here:

http://docs.heroku.com/constraints#read-only-filesystem
Ha! Yes, that would make more sense in context, wouldn't it... ;)
fair point - we tried to use a name that creates a response in people and is inclusive. most ppl either smile at us or with us hearing the name and we like that :) what do you think about the idea behind the name?
I agree with Alex. We can say that e-commerce is still in the "pre-google" phase, by analogy to search.

E-commerce sites could be much more than electronic mail-order catalogs. Amazon has tapped one dimension with customer reviews, but there's enormous room for improvement.

As Alex points out, the burden is still on the consumer to perform labor-intensive research. We need to change this.
Back in 1989 a proposal was written about organising information within CERN for the "LHC era". (http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html)

There's some irony that twenty years later you're able to use the very technology spawned by that proposal to write a comment asking whether all the expense and effort of the LHC and CERN will have any practical technological gains.
"the more expensive camera shoots 720p video, has optical image stabilization, and a larger display."

Which sounds like one codec chip that is still too new to be a commodity, one routine that takes a lot of time and effort to get really right, and an actually more expensive part. Additionally, the internals for the video might require a more expensive bus going out to the storage device and possible more cache memory to grease the wheels. I'm not having a hard time believing this all adds up to around $100 of parts and design labor. Maybe it doesn't, but it's enough I'd want to see proof of the claim the customer is getting ripped off.
Einstein too. Relativistic effects are pretty significant in GPS technology.

http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps....
No, I'm talking about the definition of Monad themselves. They don't work the way most people think they do, especially most of the critics. Monads have that function application step, and at every point that function can be applied one, zero, or many times. There is no "remembering" of a Nothing; the Monad definition is such that it calls the next application function zero times and immediately returns Nothing, which short-circuits the remainder of the monadic computation. That is, it doesn't "keep running" anyhow the way you might expect an imperative language would (or might, anyhow).

This is why I also point out the list monad; fully understanding that is necessary to be sure you understand monads. I have seen numerous "monad" implementations in $YOUR_FAVORITE_LANGUAGE that can't do the list monad correctly because they can do 0 and 1 applications of a function, but can't correctly do arbitrarily many, because the people implementing the Monad interface didn't actually understand the interface. (In fact when I see such an implementation the first thing I look for now is the list monad, and so far of the four or five I've seen only one has gotten it right.)
Thanks for this observation, however you (in your comment) and everyone else uses the word "monad" as a noun. Hence much confusion.

I agree with you here 100%. I was confused for years for this exact reason.

I tried avoiding the noun form for a while, but the problem is that while it's technically correct, nobody "in the know" quite understands what you are talking about. "Why didn't he just call it a Monad?"

Why not say "The List just happens to be monadic", rather than saying it is a monad?

I should have.
Any idea how many paying clients they have? I know they offer a fremium (which is good).
1) True
2) True
4) True
3) True. But I followed up. Signed in today for the first time in several months. My first hand was AA, I kid you not. Followed by: AQ,AT,66,KQ. Then the hands started to look normal. Within the remainder of the 30 minutes that I played though, sure enough, I was dealt 22 and two more deuces came on the flop. Another 4-of-a-kind. I still think something is fishy. If it is unbalanced, my guess would be that is to encourage new players or ones who haven't logged in for awhile to stay and play... boosting Zynga's numbers.
You could build on bespin, they have git and hg hook, I guess a heroku hook would be less work than supporting a whole editor.
Sorry, they can't do that. Then an attacker could do one or a small number of CAPTCHAs, and then use the now-proven-"good" account to do some amount of mischief before getting shut down, where the amount of mischief is proportional to how much Google et al accommodate your otherwise-reasonable request.
I think you are off base. My daughter has played cello for quite a few years. She reports that it needs to be played regularly or the sound changes. The music store where she bought this invites violin and cello players to come and play instruments in storage to keep them in shape.

This is not bunk.
Fairy-Tern Chalet website - Seychelles
The Fairy-Tern Chalet is a perfect gateway for families and honeymooners seeking isolation.
[..] things have gotten much worse. A friend of mine told me that when she worked at the local Staples, there was a family that would show up anytime anything was on sale, buy whatever the item maximum limit was, take them home, attempt to sell the items on eBay for a profit, and then later return anything they couldn't sell.

Worse? That's called arbitrage and it's been going on since the idea of commerce sprung up in human skulls. He seems to be passing a moral judgement on the practice but there's nothing wrong with it. If someone wants to spend their time buying, say, 10 laptops on sale at Best Buy for $299 and selling them on eBay for $349, that's (on the surface) an honest business, and gives people who don't want to go to the store an opportunity to buy at a price they still consider reasonable.
The Programmer's Folly: HeatMaps, CakePHP and "Best Practices"
Modern Debate and The Misguided Scorn for Pathos
I think jordanf's startup Kallow has been doing a great job hitting this market, at least for me. Even as a technical consumer, I don't want to do in-depth review searches, I simply want to optimize for ( value / price ) / time. I've made four purchases based on Kallow and have been very happy.

Kallow certainly isn't the ultimate answer, but it's a step in the right direction.
You find Gimp's core menus erratically organized or the extension/plugin menus erratically organized? I've had issue with the more recent incarnations of the preferences window, but the core Edit, Layer, Image menus I've had no problem with. If you're often using a plugin, which have traditionally, for some reason, been sorted into menus based on the language they're written in (thankfully this has been getting attention in the 2.x releases, now a few years old), then I can definitely sympathize.

Some filters and plugins might really be better if integrated into the core menus, but then you run into problems with a plugin seeming to override a core menu item (maybe this is desirable) producing a confusing interface for the user. In this regard, Gimp had taken a play from the likes of KPT, where all those cool filters were available as a separate (and guh, inconsistent) menu/UI to call them out as separate (although, in the case of KPT, it seemed to be more of a branding thing).

I think a lot of the problems stem from the need for a consistent UI being incompatible with a tool that is infinitely extendable by the user via installable plugins. You end up with something like the Windows 95 Start menu, where all vendors were effectively encouraged to put things wherever they wanted in the hope that you'd find them the easiest and/or associate the application with their brand (all Adobe products being in the Adobe subfolder, for example).
Insurance companies regularly engage private investigators to spy upon and photograph people they suspect of fraud, or whom they just want to find an excuse to stop providing benefits to. Sadly, I don't know how controversial or different this is (putting aside my personal feelings about it). The only real difference here is that an insurance investigator found photos instead of taking them. Either way, the same photos taken by an investigator would have been used the same way.
Interviewing with YC [2005]
Good tips - I also like Ryan Singer's talk on the subject:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1952-i-gave-a-talk-on-ui-fund...
Presumably this could be solved by writing a hand logger. I play the Zynga Shootout regularly and would be happy to run one, though I'm not sure how one would be able to architect it simply enough that I'd be able to audit it. Perhaps if someone reverse-engineered their network protocol; it appears to be at least partially unencrypted.
Obviously the company as a whole, and not just the PM, learned to sleep just fine with all that revenue since this happened 7 years ago.
Can an iphone web app be "sold" through the app store?
If you can confirm that your monads follow the Monad Laws, you've solved the halting problem.
Search User Interfaces - free book
FlightCaster (YC S09) Takes Off With $1.3 Million In Funding And A New API
Google tech-talk by the author at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpBAg4Ndi9w&feature=sub
Same here, with OpenID.
> After ten years I am f*ing tired of the "Web development is not real programming" bullshit that the arrogant bastards in "real programming" are spouting because they’re too frightened to learn something new.

As someone who tinkered with browser-specific Javascript in the ugly, pre-jQuery early days of DHTML and failed to see where Javascript and HTML and CSS were headed (retreating into the safe world of Java for years - completely missing the ascendance of XHTML/jQuery/CSS - rendering my web skills of the Netscape 4.x era), I agree.
I don't understand your concern. When you say 'Upon calling something_async, the code starts waiting and blocks further execution until it is ready', you're describing a synchronous call. Indeed window.confirm is a synchronous function--nothing is executed until it returns.

And yes, both asynchronous and synchronous operations have their place, umm, except perhaps in Haskell where things get funky. Chaining async operations together in javascript can be tedious, but its easy enough to write a helper function to handle it for you. Every javascript app I've written that uses AJAX always has some form of createCallback(context, function, arguments) function.
Thoughts on Supercool School from someone that has used it (me): http://paulstamatiou.com/review-supercool-school-online-lear...
rsync does delete files if you ask it too. See the man page :)
no. I suppose you could if you made an app that was nothing more than a wrapper around a web view, but I don't think that is what you mean.
The demo of the jQuery-based jQTouch Beta shows how an iPhone web app could have a visual look similar to that of a native app.

Yes, you'll never recreate Tweetie 2 with it, and it provides a lot of eye candy. The animation demos (page flip) are impressive. Web apps aren't as sexy as native apps, and they can allow you to "run" on multiple mobile devices, with pretty much the same server-side code.

http://www.jqtouch.com/preview/demos/main/#home
The New FlightCaster (YC) API, Developer Center, and Recent Funding
Work place bullying
found out how terrible it is, and i would like to know who among you have been bullied? we are the last industrialized country to view workplace bullying with the seriousness that it deserves.
I don't think so, but perhaps you can charge for a subscription fee or one-time payment through your site?
With regard to Erlang, are you sure?
Joe Armstrong seems to think its fine for string manipulation...

http://www.erlang.org/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?4:mss:47293:200911:d...

(You can either think that he is biased or that he would be an expert on it).

I mean, it seems to me that javascripts main advantage in programming for the web would be DOM manipulation. And that is good, but a lot of languages can do it. (Honestly I've never really done (much) direct string manipulation for web programming).

It doesn't seem to me that javascript really has a monopoly on event driven programming either. It is relatively easy to do that sort of thing in almost any other functional style language...
Ask HN: Disadvantages of event-driven web architecture?
There's been a lot of talk about even-driven web servers lately - nodejs and Tornado come to mind - but I've not seen much discussion about _why_ we should or shouldn't be using event-driven architectures for our sites.

What's the downside? Why shouldn't I be using an event-driven architecture for all of my sites?
I hate to say it but I would never use an iphone web app over a native one. It's less about looks than it is about feel / responsiveness. You also will always be stuck dealing with the forward button / back button structure.
Will Micro Classifieds work?
Hello!

I am a small entrepreneur based in India. I would like to build a micro classifieds website. But, I am unable find a good information on its growth and existence.

I have seen couple of micro classifieds sites but they are still immature and not popular. I think a normal classifieds website has more market.

Does micro classifieds have demand in current market? If any what will be the best approach to reach people?

I would like to your opinions on this.

Thank you!
As I said "Useful abstractions always have their limits" you can represent any tree using the relational model. The basic problem is recursive data structures need a higher level of abstraction. Consider the following situation:

Bob is managed by Ted
Ted is managed by Bob

If that situation is allowed then all recursive queries need to deal with it. On the other hand if it is NOT allowed then every commit needs to deal with it. However, while the relational model does not understand those issues just like it does not understand HTML it still stores the data just fine. Generally it's a fairly moot point because it's a program talking to the database and not a person, so that program can provide that level of abstraction just fine, granted it's less efficient than a model that understood the abstraction.

As to speed, Relational Databases are the x86 chips of the Database world. There are plenty of custom system that are faster doing specific things, but they sacrifice speed for adaptability and backwards comparability. For example: A core 2 chip's instruction decoder and an SQL databases query optimizer do basically the same thing. With a custom solution you can just skip that step and directly say what to do, but the abstraction is normally worth it so you can upgrade the hardware for years without changing the program.

So the relational model makes the basic assumption that speed is not the primary concern or you would be writing at a more basic level, yet people want more speed so there are plenty of real world hacks to help things along like CONNECT BY and stored procedures, and all those new x86 instructions. So, 99.9% of the time in the real world an of the shelf database running on an x86 chip is plenty fast if used correctly and it's also fairly cheap compared to the total costs of the other solutions.
Thanks, interesting paper. Are you a researcher in this area? If so, I was
wondering whether you know of any work that tries to PREDICT
an expected citation score for a paper based only on information available at its time of publication? For example, one obvious predictor would be the journal in which a paper is
published, assuming a paper in a high ranking journal is more likely to have a high citation score in the future. However, I have a couple of other predictors in mind that might be interesting.
Here is something a little bit more complicated. 70-80 % win ratio. Please stop with the 8/10 losses misinformation.

http://www.tradingtheodds.com/strategy-performance/
Be careful what you wish for: generating a diversity of ever-better options for the savvy consumers is at least partially subsidized with the margins extracted from inattentive 'casual' consumers.

Reduce those margins, and it's possible that the prices paid by savvy shoppers could go up, and the pace of innovation -- exploring the technology/marketing solution space -- go down.
Well considering I'm a libertarian, that is quite false.

But I am an industrial engineer, so I know a thing or two about factories.
The end of television?
Cracked.com – America's Only Humor & Video Site Since 1958
Even Apple does this: that's the point of Steve Jobs' legendary tendency to criticize in-house prototypes over and over until he's satisfied.
I loved these tricks. Here's a site dedicated to command line tricks:

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse/sort-by-votes

Being on a Mac, I didn't have the rename or prename command, but after a lot of searching, found it here:

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=303814

(beware the '+' signs at the beginning of each line)
Walled Gardens, VM Sharecroppers, and "Sugar Daddies"
Congrats, the b2b partnerships sounds like a solid business model. Plus it'd be easier to charge a frequently travelling exec for the service then the average consumer.

Hopefully the service can expand outside of the US. I see the limited/varied data of each country as the biggest technical hurdle they'll have to overcome.
Actually the retail markup on video games is relatively low, particularly when compared to books. This is why online prices don't vary much from brick and mortar and why the used game market is what drives retail game stores.
Gah! They're going to run it for a year at 3.5TEV and then shut it down, why? if they've fixed the magnet problem from last year why can't they go full force now?
Instead of captchas, which I can't stand doing myself and didn't want to impose on my site users, I implemented a three-pass filter for anonymous comments:

1. Answer a simple math question (e.g. "What do you get if you multiply 5 by 1?").

2. Hidden form field that is supposed to stay empty.

3. Spam word filter ("cialis", "levitra", etc.).

After I put this in place a couple of years ago, the daily number of spam comments my site got dropped from 200 to zero. I was worried that it wouldn't last, but to this day I've only had to delete about five spam comments in total - and they were posted in registered user accounts.
i can't take you seriously. need to change your name. this is a case where the name matters just 'cuz it is so damn bad.