skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This sounds like a classic antitrust issue. Definition of antitrust from Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act:

A Section 1 violation has three elements:

1. An agreement

2. which unreasonably restrains competition

3. and which affects interstate commerce.

If Microsoft were to make such an agreement with Fox where they would pay them to be delisted from Google, it would be an agreement which unreasonably restrains competition and it affects interstate commerce. (As would anything online which is a revenue source)

I surely wouldn't put evil past Microsoft, but I doubt they would actually be so stupid, especially given their prior too-close-for-comfort experiences with federal antitrust law.
I'm rather surprised by all the comments here who don't seem to see a problem with fragmented search.

As the article points out, such a strategy means that newcomers to the market have to compete based on initial funding - not technology. And to claim that Google has a 'free ride' is rubbish - for that to happen it would have to be a one sided relationship, but here news being indexed by Google is mutually beneficial - with one partner starting to get a bit greedy.
> So are you willing to settle for 10's of millions?

I thought that the original claim was suggesting that fascists and fellow travelers were bigger killers than socialists/communists.
Google Acquires Teracent: Wants to Offer Smarter Display Ads
"Big Bang" machine set to yield surprises
That sounds like an error that would have been detected by a unit test.
"If Microsoft were to make such an agreement with Fox where they would pay them to be delisted from Google, it would be an agreement which unreasonably restrains competition and it affects interstate commerce. (As would anything online which is a revenue source)"

This is the part I don't agree with. I fail to see how not having the FIM properties in a search engines' index precludes Google (or anyone else) from competition.

SAA cases are hard to prove. This wouldn't cut it IMHO (IANAL though, so who knows).

Anecdotally, Google not having MySpace, Fox News, and the other FIM properties in their index would actually be a selling point to me. IMHO, Microsoft is choosing the wrong content to lock down (although I do see the inherent "First they came for Fox News" problem here).
True, but the exercise described is a good example of how educators set impossibly lofty goals and then declare them fulfilled on the basis of a shallow, pious ritual. In this case, the goal is for teachers to understand culture and cultural difference and gain a critical cultural perspective on their own culture. How do you reliably accomplish this with college kids? Well, you can't. You don't. You just make them recite a shibboleth of their culture -- a very white, very privileged, very genteel culture -- shallow formulas that are easily parroted by college kids with narrow experience. As snarky and ineffective as the article is, the writer does perceive that the real purpose is entirely opposite to the declared purpose. These future teachers are not learning to be open to and less judgmental of the cultures of their students. They are repudiating the culture they were born into so they can be initiated into a more enlightened culture from which they will patronize and feel compassion for their students.

The writer is also dead on in his comparison with oppressive left-wing regimes (though theocratic regimes would have been a good comparison as well.) Forcing people to declare breakthroughs of personal insight and understanding, and subjecting these declarations to the scrutiny of enlightened officials, is a dangerous farce. Anyone trying to actually achieve and describe such a breakthrough -- for example, a student actually grappling with his own feelings about certain American subcultures -- is doomed to failure. Yet even the least enlightened person can trivially pass the test by parroting approved language. This is the enforcement of orthodoxy under the guise of fostering personal growth. The parallel to the Cultural Revolution is exact.
An excuse to share my favorite bash.org quote:

<glyph> For example - if you came in here asking "how do I use a jackhammer" we might ask "why do you need to use a jackhammer"
<glyph> If the answer to the latter question is "to knock my grandmother's head off to let out the evil spirits that gave her cancer", then maybe the problem is actually unrelated to jackhammers

http://bash.org/?866112
The task they did do, that needed doing, was causing a shift in thinking that was tantamount to the shift you undergo when you learn Prolog, having only been exposed to Assembler.

By abstracting away the storage model, you can reuse the same database calls in the browser (SQLite), on one machine (MySQL/Postgres), or on a cluster, and you're free to think about more business-specific logic.
Google Acquires Teracent To Apply Machine Smarts To Display Ads
The idea you could index a site against its wishes remains to be tested; the custom so far has been not to do so. Google tried indexing books without rightsholder permission, then backed down.

If NewsCorp, NYTimesCo, WashingtonPost, ComcastNBC, etc. are unified against the idea of indexing-as-fair-use, and if (for business strategic reasons), the deep-pocketed MSFT and Google decide they can live with paying-for-permission (as a useful barrier to upstarts), who will prove the case in the courts or legislature?
> what's to stop a spider from indexing it?

a robots.txt that forbids a particular spider from accessing the content.

This assumes that the spider does respect the robots.txt, which googlebot does.
I haven't worked much with Haskell, but at first blush, monads to me seem almost like a perverse functional converse to Greenspun's 10th Law. Haskell is purely functional, which imposes programing constraints, but of course it's turing-complete so it can still do anything a procedural language can. In the limit case, it can use denotational semantics to describe an emulation of a state-based program. And that's what a monad is (or at least, that's what they look like to me): a DSL for denotational semantics.

Altogether, that's probably for the better. If people are going to use denotational semantics to emulate a state-capabale environment, it's better if the method for doing so is standardized, well-specified, and optimized.
I think there is definitely a communicative advantage to the 'lingua franca' concept as it applies to programming languages. Think of programs as the semi-English (English is actually the true lingua franca of programming :)) representation of Turing machines. In this sense, every language can communicate approximately the same thing.

I don't think JavaScript will cover every paradigm in the sense of obscure language concepts, in that it will likely never have Lisp's complicated macro system or Ruby's ability to make really fluid DSLs. I don't want it to; the appeal to me is that what's going on in JavaScript is almost always self-evident (if you avoid the bad parts). () means you're calling a function or forcing operator association. {} means you're defining a block, array, or dictionary.

I do think, though, that it could establish the new minimum standards of the 'demo language' for an algorithm. For algorithm demonstration and sharing, I think it's absolutely awesome that there is a language that is now capable of doing anything you want with an interpreter (albeit DOM-confined) pre-installed on every single computer you use. I don't want to read Wikipedia algorithms in some hacked-up Pascal. Give me something I can run now, but that's universally understood: a strong common medium to explain programming languages in unobfuscated terms.
Userland code can't usually modify program text. The kernel can. The kernel will modify program text on your program's behalf if you own the process you want to modify. Depending on the OS, that happens via WriteProcessMemory, ptrace, Mach, or procfs.
I thought it would be interesting to use Google Moderator to anonymously list and vote on unspeakable taboos.

But it's been 30 minutes and the exercise appears to have failed. Maybe what I should have done is spend some time contributing ideas of my own before opening it up to others. Or maybe I should have linked to the voting page instead of the description page.
"With the recent arrival of object-oriented databases, the industry may finally achieve some of the promises which were made 20 years ago about the capabilities of computers to automate and improve organizations."

um... wow... this 1 sentence discredits the entire email. Object Oriented Databases were a HUGE failure. I can't be sure but PostgreSQL might be the only surviving one, and it survived because it went relational. just my 2 cents.
I'm thinking that the publicity that they'll get prior to then (and the orders) will hopefully exceed the $100K for them. Awesome company and I love ordering from them.
This may be a publicity opportunity taken by Microsoft: a great opportunity to credit bing with having better results.
Here is the interview about pulling down links from google:

http://mumbrella.com.au/murdoch-well-probably-remove-our-sit...
Whoa- I used 1800-Flowers to send flowers to my mom. I didn't fall for the loyalty garbage, but they spam the bejesus out of me. I guess I need to find someone else for these holidays.
"enormous de-industrialization projects"

Honest question: What projects are you referring to?
I don't think you've defended your position as well as you think you have, and you didn't need to stoop to the "liberal Godwin". He implies a pretty basic definition of evil- that which hurts everyone else. It's not given that this is better for newspapers than open search engine access, nor that this preserves the production of "beneficial" news.
I use direct uploads to S3 to get around this. It works much better as a long term solution and you can easily do image processing somewhere else in the background.
No it doesn't.. ok, early 90s, people thought object oriented everything was the way forward.

But his main point, that blasting through a flat file without a ton of row-locking and transactional overhead could satisfy a number of needs better than the actual DBMS, is still true.

If you need to be transactional, on the other hand, that's a different story.
Not that I necessarily disagree with your point, but it should be mentioned that Hitler and the Nazi party as a whole were not atheists. I don't know where the idea that they were atheists comes from.
At US$9,000 per square foot (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1204057..., section "A Real Estate Bubble (Sound Familiar?)") Hong Kong isn't really affordable as a place to live. And if you get in now you'll be there in time for the ride down.
HBS Biz Plan Winner Gets Venture Capital Funding
The best thing you can ever do for your company is to put every employee in front of customers. One of the things that attracted me to FreshBooks was that they rotate everyone through customer support continuously. As a (former) developer who was tired of consistently building the wrong thing because sales and marketing jealously guarded the customer, this was very refreshing.

This isn't a novel idea. Many companies with customer service orientations have done this. If you're selling Software-as-a-Service, that ought to include you!
Agreed. I'll add that all the time he spent hunting down the bug put him into a position to really understand the question he was asking the expert.

As frustrating as these little problems can be, really digging in and taking the time to understand it is what experience is all about.
New Virginia IT Systems Lack Network Backup
Ouch. This is why I usually buy everything from Amazon, instead of some random place that shows up in Google Shopping results.
They might be. For every person that implements this trick, there are 100 more that are making only the minimum payment every month and paying thousands of dollars in interest (free money).
Http://www.imagebam.com/my_images
I liked this story a lot. The statistic about 6.4 million over 65, presumably in the UK (total pop. 61 mil) who haven't ever used the Internet was quite shocking.
I'd go further and say that this is a shady blog post from the Bountii crew. If you're going to publicly accuse your competitors of something negative, it's incumbent upon you to be very certain that you're correct. I've emailed them a link to this comment section, and I hope to see this post edited as appropriate.
Thanks for the feedback.

=== ImageMagick

We have a couple thousand apps using ImageMagick/RMagick, and haven't had any reports of missing functions. We are running ImageMagick 6.2.4 (will be updated to 6.3 sometime soon), so you might check that, and also be sure you aren't trying to use custom-compiled options. If you still have trouble, open a ticket and we'll take care of it:
http://support.heroku.com/tickets/new

=== Uploads

We also have thousands of apps doing large file uploads. They should be done as described here:
http://docs.heroku.com/s3

Specifically, for larger uploads (we recommend for anything bigger than 4MB), it's wise not to run the upload direct to a dyno, tying up one of your app servers and risking a timeout - it's just not a scalable way to do it. A good pattern is to upload direct to S3 instead, as directed at the bottom of the page. We recommend the S3 SWF Upload plugin:
http://github.com/GreenAsJade/s3-swf-upload-plugin/tree/mast...
Are they still supporting the herokugarden editor? That thing was awesome since designers could get started w/o installing anything at all.

Feels like they are no longer supporting that. Is that right?
> Biological systems follow the rule "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", which states that every higher-level organism goes through a developmental history which mirrors the evolutionary development of the species itself.

I learned that that was incorrect in high school.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory
Judging from various codebases I've had to maintain, most programmers don't think this is a joke. They really think this guy wasted 8 hours learning how his code is supposed to work. They would have just reverted to last night's version and moved on to adding some more technical debt. (It's OK because it's test-driven development. If the tests pass, the code is fine!)
"Could you explain the excitement and appeal to me?"

There's not much I can say that I didn't already say in my blog entry. JavaScript is designed for event-driven programming in the browser, and my brief experience with node.js makes me believe that it also works well for event-driven programming on the server. And V8 is really fast.

As for Erlang... when you're programming for the web, it's useful to have a programming language that treats strings as more than just an array of integers.
When carrier bandwidth allows for it in ~5 or more years, streaming live content to cell phones might become an option (3D games over OnLive, etc). But it's likely going to be a while before carriers can support this, given the need for low latency and high-bandwidth for many games to provide a good end-user experience.

Streaming live video en-masses would likely exist* far before streaming games, given you can buffer video to compensate for latency. Games couldn't be easily buffered as they require instant feedback between button-presses and what's seen on the screen.

*Streaming video does indeed exist for cell phones, but not on a mass-scale, at least in the United States.
Now we see the upside of a careful app approval process.
What's the difference between object oriented and document oriented databases?

Aren't all of the recent key/value databases lately pretty much the same concept as an object database?

Sorry if that's a dumb question...
Exactly. Most people use DelayedJob to do image processing in the background - also the correct/scalable way to do it. More here:

http://docs.heroku.com/background-jobs

http://docs.heroku.com/delayed-job
First Collisions at the LHC
I disagree. As a web site owner I should be able to decide who does and doesn't index my site. If I don't want Google (or MS or Yahoo) to index my site that is my prerogative and I'd be mightily annoyed if those sites ignored my robot.txt file.

Or from a different perspective, if I have to sign a contract with one publisher that only they are allowed to publish an article I wrote, would that be an antitrust violation?

Personally I fail to see why people are so upset. If it's my content, I should get to decide who indexes it. If one company demands exclusive access to my content for me to get paid, then it is fully within my right to grant them that exclusive access.
Is there a law against it? I thought robots.txt is more of a convention. However, Google already said that they would heed the robots.txt.
It isn't a product, but a research project. I typically name my projects whatever since they are internal and will most likely not lead to confusion in the marketplace.
Correct, the editor is no longer supported. We hope to bring it back sometime in the future.
Cyber Monday a Myth?
GemStone was beloved of most who used it, and it is poised to make a comeback through MagLev.

Meanwhile, ORMs (which attempt to implement an OODB on top of an RDB) are ubiquitous.
True, I'm pretty sure I was a nett loss for them though. As said by another comment, they rely on most people not doing this.
The Terms & Conditions make me leery. I have an app that would be a very good fit for their niche and user base but reading the T&C doc http://developer.linkedin.com/docs/DOC-1013 was a bucket of cold water to the face.

Restrictions like

h Charge, directly or indirectly, any incremental fees (including any unique, specific, or premium charges) for access to LinkedIn’s Content or your integration of the APIs in your Application;

or

i. Use the Content in any advertisements or for purposes of targeting advertisements (whether such advertisement appear in your Application or elsewhere);

or

m Use the APIs in an Application that competes with products or services offered by us;

Those are a big red flag, and tell me that LinkedIn is not serious about open participation. It seems that they fear the possibility of one of their API users making money without giving them a cut. This makes their API deeply unattractive to me, what if I have some success w/ my app and they decide to do something like it.

It seems like they would be happy to shoot partner apps in the head in order to eat their lunch. And that means that linkedin api integration takes a back seat to pretty much anyone elses.
Twitter misidentifying context
No doubt you're right. I guess it's just a generational thing. I hear Google, Amazon, iTunes, and I see immediate value.

For some reason, even though I'm aware of all (or at least most) of the arguments that place value in Facebook / Twitter etc. I still wouldn't feel comfortable investing in it. I'm probably dating myself pretty badly, but they look fluffy to me.
Storage limits are for database data only, they don't apply to assets like uploads. Assets should be stored in an asset store, like S3.
People act like non-relational data storage is some kind of new idea, but it's not. Even if you discount flat files, there's still BerkelyDB (early 90's) and the things it was meant to improve on (earlier). Why, then, are relational databases popular?

I find it hard to believe the author's claim that it's because people wanted to claim they were doing fancy math with their data storage, over all other considerations. If this were the case, Lisp would have been the programming lingua franca through the 70s and 80s, not C. Lisp is obviously closer to its mathematical roots.

Maybe it's because relational databases got the nice consistency features first; Interbase certainly predates BerkeleyDB. I'm more inclined to think it's a combination of two factors: First, the database can do much of the heavy lifting for you. This is nice to application programmers who are stuck with the likes of C, FORTRAN, COBOL, and Pascal; it's less interesting with functional abstractions available.

Second, you get the SQL prompt. It's a dangerous tool, and should almost never be used for updates, but it's really nice to be able to answer unanticipated questions by simply writing up a query. Think of what the Django admin buys you; this is like a miniature version of that.
We've seen a ton of Couch and Mongo apps lately - works very well with Heroku. Check out
http://www.mongohq.com.
It is interesting how this modern Godwin ("You know who else abused the term 'evil'? That's right, Bush did!"), which itself is in a way a Godwin as it 'ends the discussion' by equating Bush to Hitler. If that is what you want, it is mission accomplished. Oops, that doesn't mean what it used to.
Ask HN: Going semi-freelance, quitting the 8-5?
hey all you HN'ers, I've been mulling over this decision this weekend and thought I'd get some input from people who are actually doing it.

I got an offer from someone I do a lot of freelance work for on the side for a full time job as a technical lead/lead programmer type position. Offers me the ability to telecommute, flex hours and paid healthcare, on top of that it matches my current salary pre-healthcare.

So in your experience fellas, what are some serious pros/cons to this? I grew up in family businesses and am no stranger to keeping myself disciplined and motivated, so hopefully that won't be much of an issue.

Any input is greatly appreciated, thanks!

EDIT: Forgot to make it clear, it's still a freelance position, but the contract will have guaranteed hours/pay/schedule to cover us both.
Economically speaking your almost certainly right; but as a lifestyle choice I think it's rock solid.

So maybe not sound business; but as long as there isn't a net loss in the reasonably long term...
Seemingly the same Henry Baker who wrote all those papers on garbage collection.

http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/

http://www.bakercapital.com/team_baker_g.html

Also, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ResponseToBakersAntiRelationalPaper

(all via http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?HenryBaker)
Cisco SIO To Go, an iPhone application
My bad Jason. Your article struck a sour note with me that day for some reason.
While not perfect, JS is actually pretty pleasant to use. Also I like not having to use different languages between client and server.

What popular languages are cooler than JS? Maybe Ruby, but for my taste there is too much metaprogramming in Ruby which makes it very hard to master. I like the extreme simpleness of JS (basically everything is a hash, that's it).

Though I must admit that now that it looks like it has a shot at being the language for everything, I am getting second thoughts. Those brackets can get ugly - something with a slightly cleaner syntax might have been preferable. But all current languages have their pros and cons, and JS doesn't fare badly in copmparison.

For example I think Ruby takes it too far - you can get clean syntax, but the tendency to create something like a DSL for everything is also a burden for learning. Plus, Ruby is still too slow for a lot of tasks.