skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"P2. Good programmers are up to 30 times better than mediocre programmers, according to "individual differences" research. Given that their pay is never commensurate, they are the biggest bargains in the software field."

P3. Good programmers are defined as those programmers that produce good products. If you focus only on coding speed or analytical skill, you may miss out on the best programmers.

P4. If you are paying your good programmer less than you know s/he is worth, count on them leaving soon. You will deserve the loss.
in NJ, the ping is higher on google's servers than it is for OpenDNS (about 20ms vs 13ms) for me.
Lots of forms of art don't get a genera name until after they've started ;). Just because the first "cubist" painting came before the term got coined doesn't mean it isn't a cubist painting. And just because this showed up a few decades before ASCII itself was hammered out doesn't mean we all don't know exactly what it is when it's described as ASCII art.
This is what a quick comparison looks like from NYC (in ms):

Level 3 Google OpenDNS
lifehacker.com 21 22 19
facebook.com 20 22 19
manu-j.com 21 44 42
reddit.com 30 73 20
tb4.fr 125 22 157
bbc.co.uk 103 22 98

The IP's used are 4.2.2.2, 8.8.8.8, and 208.67.222.222, respectively.

Using the script provided here: http://www.manu-j.com/blog/opendns-alternative-google-dns-ro...
Note that they don't seem to be proxying opendns's domain...
FlightCaster (YC S09) open-sources Crane: Hadoop Clusters on EC2
The present government are quite happy to throw away the people's historic rights such as the rihght to a fail trial and no collective punishment, in their Digital Economy Bill, in order to line foreigners' pockets (the RIAA and MPAA).

And the Tories' response to this? They think the DE Bill is basically sound, but doesn't go far enough.

I think we can take it as read that both the Labour and Conservative parties, when faced with a choice between the British people, and lining foregners' pockets, will choose the latter, esepcially when they are big donors.
Sounds just like "free software" to me--you're free from the constraints of commercialization, but not from the constraints of the programmers' social ideologies.

I'm not saying this to troll, I can just imagine lots of situations where I may want to set up a mailing list, but few where I want that list to become some sort of anarchic debating society where someone else's software handles the moderation for me.
If you ever use GHC, you'll notice how slowly it compiles. However, this dilemma (trilemma?) is a false one. You can have unboxed (in relevant cases) generics in a language that compiles faster than C++ with full-blown templates. C# and Ada come to mind.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=952743
from the post:

Google Public DNS complies with the DNS standards and gives the user the exact response his or her computer expects without performing any blocking, filtering, or redirection that may hamper a user's browsing experience.
I completely agree. Still probably happens more often than we'd like to think
There are a whole host of ways that Haskell supports (or has been extended to support) generic programming. There's a big overview here:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Research_papers/Generics

In the simplest case, generic programming in Haskell is done using type classes (similar to OO "interfaces"), often with the GHC extension for derivable type classes. If I understand correctly, this is generally implemented by implicitly passing a table of type information to the generic function at runtime, though I believe that compilers are able to optimize this away at compile time in some (most?) cases.

I'm not sure how well any of this would apply to Go, which doesn't have Haskell's type system.
You store a normal AMI on S3, which is $.15/GB. If you care about costs, you should be doing all of your high IO tasks on the /mnt swap drive, so your IO costs should be pretty low. It's probably a wash.
Striving For Privacy May Instead Bring Unwanted Attention
It's an interesting idea, but based on some early tests it looks like a losing bet to me.

My ping from a dedicated 15mb Qwest circuit to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 is between 57ms and 75ms. However, cached DNS resolutions run at around 12ms from our default DNS servers. Even uncached resolutions are still way faster than the round-trip to Google.

Google Public DNS might be worth it if every single one of your DNS queries would result in a cache miss, but otherwise I don't see the performance improvement Google is gunning for.

That said, it is nice to have a public option.
Tool of the Day: OfficeMedium, A social network for your office
They are better than 4.2.2.2 in USA.
They probably sandbagged their lifespan by a factor of 2-3 (6-9 months design lifespan), but I doubt anyone expected them to last for 6+ years. Engineers don't often try to exceed design goals by more than a factor of 10, because that typically requires a completely different design.

Mechanical windshield wipers would probably get clogged and jammed by dust, for instance. I'm from New England; I usually had to manually clean the snow/salt/mud/ice off my windshield wipers every couple days or so during the winter. There's nobody who can step outside the Mars Rovers and run their fingers along the wiper blades.
No one cares about your stupid little startup - 5 tips to make them care
Introducing YouTube Feather
While we're on the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann

Who are their contemporary equivalents, I wonder? Would Alan Kay and his lab's FONC [1] research qualify? I suppose time will tell...

1. http://vpri.org/html/words_links/articles_ifnct.php
What do you think the Google Toolbar and Chrome do? Ironic coming from the largest advertising and redirection company in the world. :-)

Still, users having choice and forcing businesses to compete to win is good for end users and I support that 100%.
Guy Steele: Why Object-Oriented Languages Need Tail Calls
He's not a real doctor. :)

Seriously, though ... The WSJ probably has a style guide which tries to avoid honorifics and degree references. It is hard to track and verify, and is inconsistently used among recipients.

BTW, a problem which I think requires a solution is a degree verification marketplace -- not just for employers and reporters to check someone's credentials, but also for people who may need to get some sort of confirmation on their own for whatever purpose. My wife had to do that for a vocational school which wanted to make sure an earlier degree from a foreign college was legit, It involved mailing or faxing a copy of her transcript to some service which sends back a letter saying it's real -- and costs $75. Inefficient, labor-intensive prone to abuse, and way too expensive -- prime candidate for a software solution, IMHO.
How the heck is http://to./ a valid domain name?
One of the problems with using 'public' DNS servers like Google and OpenDNS is that content delivery networks return the IPs of their nodes that are closest to your DNS servers based on the assumption that you are on the same network as your DNS servers.

I just did a comparison and I am 10ms away from the Akamai node returned by my ISP's DNS servers, 88ms away from the node returned by Google Public DNS, and 20ms away from the node returned by OpenDNS. Even if DNS is faster, it may make everything else slower...
What do you think about this brand-new web site?
What are your favorite about:config tricks for Firefox?
Mine are
layout.spellcheckDefault = 2
ssl_domain_display = 2
browser.search.openintab = true
A drop in search volume doesn't impact their content network ads, you are correct.

However I don't think Microsoft will let Google buy space on Bing to place their ads. Therefore a drop in search volume leads to a cut in ad revenue.

Even if placement on Bing for ad words was possible Google would have to give Microsoft a cut - right now they keep 100% of search revenue (minus operating costs). Unless Bing is substantially cheaper to run than Google that would work out badly for revenue per ad.

Worst of all from their perspective a drop in search volume would lead to a loss of opportunity to push news, gmail, youtube and especially maps/local search. These related properties must be benefiting heavily from their top placement in Google search results.
Phone support!

Google Public DNS telephone support
877-590-4367 in the U.S.
770-200-1201 outside the U.S.

I wonder if this will be a trend.
Yet again, the underheight among us are discriminated against. The shirts only go up to 3XL.
I think ideas cannot be stolen.
And, best of all, there's no spammy default site for unresolved names!
Huge Explosion Reveals the Most Massive Star Known
Countries with unwritten constitution
I didn't know who you were, but now I am very curious about what you think.
I do agree that View Source is becoming less and less useful, particularly because of JavaScript-injected DOM elements. Safari's web inspector in particular has become invaluable for this reason. Being able to see the current state of any element is incredibly useful.
I'm glad the comments there brought up content negotiation, where I see more underused potential as new features and plugins are developed. It also seems odd for a browser to give up control over which order resources are loaded in, in the name of performance. Haven't browser authors done a lot of work to first fetch resources they consider critical, make a usable partial rendering, and then fetch the rest?

Before people use this, I would hope they write some code to make their servers package the live resources on the fly. If an author has to do the packaging without a build toolchain (most people don't even use RPMs to get content onto production servers), they are likely to include resources some browsers wouldn't have fetched (or that many pages don't reference at all) and let it get out of date.
Google could fix that by setting up relationships with the big CDNs so that they could resolve to the closest locations for you.
It's kind of disappointing Google didn't get 1.3.3.7 though.
wonder how much a vanity ip like that would cost
They make you log in just to see archives, which ruins any promotional and educational value your archives have.

That's not exactly true. At Yahoo, I believe this is up to the list owner. (I know my most active list there allows viewing of archives without logging in.)

At Google, it's weirder: if you're not logged into Google at all, you can often view the archives without being prompted for a login. But if you are logged into Google elsewhere, they demand you either reconfirm your login with Groups, or logout entirely, before allowing you to view to the archives.

(That's still a problem -- enough of an annoyance in fact that I wouldn't consider hosting any more groups there until it's fixed. But it seems mainly an eccentricity of their cross-site login policies, and does still offer a route to non-logged-in viewing.)
Recommendations for you:

(1) Unless there are licensing issues, you'll probably find a bunch of useful js code you can use from OpenLayers.

(2) If you can live with a separate server process, it would be handy to just stand up GeoServer (or MapServer) and serve out WFS. ('Web Feature Service', which is served-up vector features in GML based on area of interest and other query params -- OpenLayers can parse this, which is good, because you probably don't want to write it yourself.)

(This gets you a nice decoupling at the expense of being less standalone... for example, you could shell out to ogr2ogr to get your GML instead, or switch to mapserver, etc.)

Edit: Reading your other comment, it seems speed is important, so maybe (2) isn't such a good recommendation, although it might be a good starting point since it will deal with a lot of the painful stuff (format conversions, reprojections, styling...) up front.
Good points. To quote Benjamin Franklin "Tell me and I Forget, Teach me and I Learn, Involve Me and I Remember.
But then again my set of problems is slightly different than yours. I work in advertising and often times we sell rough ideas, stories and concepts. Clients in this case also ask for data to validate these ideas. So, I do believe that there is a role (and an expectation) for powerpoint in corporate America. But I also feel that we can do a better job communicating in these situations, thus the post...
> Can we just buy the country and let the leaders go into exile?

That's actually an interesting idea. Instead of pouring hundreds of billions of dollars - that will get stolen or end up actually being harmful - in Africa's general direction, the West could do something to really help a country's people.
Having written a billing system that relied on a third-party recurring billing solution (which I later ripped out), I would advocate rolling your own subscription system for anything but the simplest case. The article has some suggestions on how to keep it simple:

1. Charge everyone on the 1st of each month.
2. Keep refunds out of your system
3. Run the billing as a batch job based off of cron

Once you've made those decisions, writing a subscription service really isn't very difficult.

It's a lot easier than dealing with multiple API calls to modify a user's subscription, any one of which may fail.

Plus you don't have to deal with polling the recurring billing service to find out a transaction's status nor the race conditions inherent in such a setup.

Finally, when you want to get more complicated and deal with promotional periods, billing on different dates for different customers, etc., you will find that it's much easier to modify your own code to fit your business requirements than it is to retrofit your interface with a third-party (not to mention any possible data migration issues).

This could be solved by an excellent recurring billing API, but most suck.
Terrific! Take a look at the way GeoDjango handles transformations between coordinate systems. That's the kind of API I had in mind.
A couple* facts to bear in mind:

(1) The $99 fee is paid up-front, not when (if!) hired.
(2) There is a limited-time price reduction (to $29) for 2009.
(3) They advertise a 90-day, no-questions-asked money back guarantee.

http://careers.stackoverflow.com/faq#pricing

* "Our chief weapon is surprise... surprise and fear..."
For Hadoop systems, using Cloudera's distribution can be very helpful with this, but existing Java libraries force Clojure developers to deal with the Java world of static compilation, command-line JAR execution, and configuration via XML. This serves as a major impediment to the kind of interactive and simple experience we expect with Clojure systems.

What is the benefit of using Clojure (as opposed to another Lisp) if the language's main USP, i.e. access to Java libraries, is turning out to be a problem? This is not a rhetorical question.
Previously:

http://code.google.com/p/google-dnswall/
We have different definitions of "troll." Your second category does not fit into mine; I do not consider someone who is genuinely trying to communicate to be a troll.

Your assumption is that it's impossible to differentiate category one from category two. I see no reason for that to be true.
Yes, same for me in picking up faint sounds. I spend a bit of time hiking and the like, and can tell from the sound of a rustle of leaves whether there was a squirrel, a raccoon, or a deer.

I think what's going on is that neurologically, my attention is always diverted by new sounds. If it's quiet and suddenly something crinkles or shuffles, I hear it extremely clearly. I use this to my advantage -- I have my cell phones set to a very faint single "beep" for their ringtone. It drives other people mad because I'll suddenly get up and go to the phone or dig in my pocket, and they never heard it go off. It's even woke me from a dead sleep.

In a natural environment, this would be a pretty useful trait to have, but in artificial environments, all the sounds are "new" and I can't make heads or tails of what's going on.
Google Gets Into The DNS Business
The essence of capitalism is free market. What is free market? It's a price mechanism that simply works far better than any other alternatives. There's no mathematical proof, but it's a matter of consensual observation. Maybe, it's worse than others in some special kinds of markets such as healthcare, but it works far better in most cases.

Then why is that? Why free market beats any other forms? Because it computes prices better than any single intelligence known in this universe and it's possible by massive interaction not just between real demand and supply sides but all the participants who care about price. The group of people who care price the most is traders. Traders are the participants whose job is all about pricing, or balancing between demand and supply. Whether or not it's profitable, it's enormous contribution to the price mechanism of free market.

Actually, all the producers in any kind of markets are essentially traders. Whether it's manufacturing, mining, or agriculture, the profit can be made only from meeting price right, not just from hard working oblivion to real demand and supply. If you broaden the concept of trading in this way, you will realize traders are everywhere and they're important as much as any other kind of physical labors. An Internet start-up is also a trader. It can succeed only in the market where it can make successful trades between its product and the cost of what it produces. That's the essence of trading and we all do it every single day.
Not TVR, TR = Testarossa
The answer to your question is in the paragraph right after the one you've quoted.
Human Tragedy - A Cloud Still Hangs Over Bhopal
Start Your Startup: "Don't Save Sex for your Old Age" (Warren Buffett)
That's funny. I'm with Rogers in Canada, and their DNS requests can take 2000 ms on a normal day.
That may be true...

but I am willing to sacrifice a few hundred ms to avoid the several seconds of frustration when typing 'gmail' into the firefox address bar gets me redirected to some stupid ass ISP specific SERPs page =D
More interesting than ping is the resolution speed. Try something like dig to get a better measure of real performance:

http://www.madboa.com/geek/dig/
It was my understanding that the Go language is still a moving target; the something closer to the final language spec should be known before discussing what it is missing.
Nope, I never said it was impossible to differentiate, I just said that the differentiation shouldn't be controlled by a few people who potentially won't understand the difference.

Here's a question for you: If you moderate a list, do you let subscribers see what you've moderated and why? If it's for the benefit of the mailing list community, then why not?
Now Google can make cash off typo domains by turning it into a Google search and hopefully earning some sponsor link clicks. Not a bad idea. I wonder if they are going to record requested URLs so they know which ones have high traffic to spider more often... I can see a lot of reasons why Google would want to offer this.
One of my most valued mentors is in his late fifties. He was easily one of the top programmers in his field at the time. He can still carry conversations with me about LISP, Fortran, and C programming as well as PHP, MySQL, and AJAX development.

He does lack in a few areas where the industry is really nascent; but for the most part he is 'caught up'. But it isn't because he memorizes APIs, it's because he as a vested interest in undertanding the how and the why of things; that one feature of his intellect is the most inspiring for me. He picks new languages up in days, not months, because he understands the fundamentals better than anyone I know.

Focus on the how and the why and you will have all of us youngins beat. The only reason younger people may be ahead is because we aren't "set in our ways"; unset yourself and be a bit younger. It does wonders for older people to realize that they can still have dynamic lives.
One bias that might be working against you is actually your longevity in the field. Coding turns over quickly; lots of programmers move to other fields or move up the ranks. To a lot of hiring managers, staying in the same career for a long time indicates an unwillingness or inability to try new things. For a secretary position, not such a big deal. For a fast field like programming, appearing static is definitely a problem (unless you're in a niche field).
icey mostly answered your point, however the trick here is that without wrapping in libraries like this, you're simply getting the same experience as java to access the particular libs, which is still easier than accessing them from another lisp such as sbcl.

Easier than everyone else does not default to "stupid easy" all the time, at least not without work from people making wrapper libs like this.
More like record every URL you visit, and use the content of those websites to determine intent, and then target ads accordingly.
Online ID: Facebook+Yahoo vs. Google+Twitter
Lots of nuggets. Here's another on selling out your company:

"You can sell it to Berkshire, and we'll put it in the Metropolitan Museum; it'll have a wing all by itself; it'll be there forever. Or you can sell it to some porn shop operator, and he'll take the painting and he'll make the boobs a little bigger and he'll stick it up in the window, and some other guy will come along in a raincoat, and he'll buy it."
thats old news. Dot TK had that for ages. go to http://tweak.tk/ and read the technical part.

They do it better though http://tk./abcde is http://abcde.tk which is even on character shorter ;)
In addition to speeding up the internet for everyone, there's a specific benefit to google: http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy.html

They can crunch the data on queries and infer which sites are popular (and in what geographic regions they're popular).
Seriously? An article amounting to "read more books, watch more movies, listen to more podcasts" gets 29 votes?
More data mining by google under the guise of global awesomeness.

The point most people miss is that all of your habits and information are under one roof and only need one subpoena to get your entire electronic life on DVD. This just adds to what they already know about your searching, emailing , communicating and spending.
This post is by Russ Cox, one of the designers of Go. He's asking for input into the design process.
I wish they had released this new feature a year ago - it would have saved me a lot of effort setting up both customers and my EC2 backed applications.

I'll use this in the future, and I will convert my own permanent EC2 instance. There is a bit of trickery that I had to learn to auto mount EBS volumes when my AMIs start up - some Ruby scripting code I probably won't have to use anymore.
Startup Advice from Paris Hilton (by Gene Marks)
This is an interesting article. The central question is, "Is this a good time to start a company?" My own experience is that anytime is a good time to start a company because paradoxically, for a struggling entrepreneur, anytime is a bad time. When the economy is doing well, everyone is doing well and there are a lot more competitions for your customers' limited resources. When the economy is doing badly, as it is now, few entrepreneurs could afford to start companies. That's the good news. The bad news is that customers are really struggling so you must have an exceptionally compelling solution that could save them money and help them survive before they would listen. So in summary, the World basically conspires against an entrepreneur irrespective of the economy and it would be like asking, "Is this a good time to fall in love?"
btw: http://tk./ works as well ;)
David Ulevitch: Some thoughts on Google DNS
Ok, that makes a bit more sense. It's not that no one can be censored, it's just that the power to do so doesn't rest with a small group of admins. That sounds much better, hope it works out!