skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's no better tool for text collaboration right now.

I've been using it for my interview transcripts. With Etherpad, I can let 12 people on Mechanical Turk each transcribe a 5-minute section of my interview. And they can all be on at once and none of them needs and account.

I can even hit the play button and see how they work:
http://mixergy.etherpad.com/ep/pad/view/23/latest
Rails 3 : Vaporware To Awesome
Richard Branson joins the space race
Good links, and I'm not at all surprised that you've put a lot of thought into it. Of all the writers that appear here on a regular basis, you have the highest signal/bullshit ratio I've seen. When you say you're giving back, I believe you.
It got made into a movie starring Bruce Willis.
I thought this was a review of http://islostarepeat.com
Oh gosh, haven't tried the downloads yet, but good geodata is really hard to get without going through a bunch of hassle.
Squad is one of my passion projects. And while I love it, I've never really thought of it as a competitor/replacement for EtherPad.

Squad serves a great purpose for developers working together on code, but it isn't embedable, and doesn't do wysiwyg text formating. It's focused on syntax highlighting and opening and saving local files. So for some it may be an alternative, but not for everybody.
Rails 3 is going to be so cool. It looks like they're expanding on the features relating to Rack, which is going to open so many possibilities. Kudos to the Rails team!
That's awesome that you've found a niche for you product, but it seems to me that with a weeks worth of tweaking, you could be the next EtherPad.
Google Public DNS vs OpenDNS vs Your ISP's DNS: Find out which is fastest
While its not text based, check out http://flockdraw.com which is a multiplayer paint I made with @lunixbochs
it's not a pyramid scheme. if you read it carefully, it's actually an inverse-pyramid scheme. the payouts are limited and well defined.
Maybe down the road. We are only about 3 days old. :)
Google's Public DNS is painfully slow for me. I have no idea what it is, but when I tried switching DNS servers last night I couldn't load anything within a reasonable time. For fun, I started a request in Safari with Google's servers, and let it sit for a few seconds. Then I switched to OpenDNS servers mid-request and it loaded instantly. I'm sticking with OpenDNS for the time being.
Is this code available anywhere? Is there an effort to embrace and improve this codebase?
Also, lousy controls and movement that made you feel like a duck - you were either flying or waddling. Then there were the boxy internal environments that emphasized the early-FPS visuals.

Really, 90% of what I saw in Second Life was more easily and better done in City of Heroes, including character design - and you didn't have to pay extra real cash to get decent clothes.

More fundamentally, though, when people were being social in SL, they were standing around and chatting. It doesn't take all the rest to accomplish that.
If front end work is important to your company and you want to invest in that competency I would suggest a little on the job training. I've been teaching myself a little more coding and the hard thing for designers is knowing what good code is. Design school training doesn't really get into many technical subjects, so sharing some websites, books, etc. with some of those ideas fleshed out would help a lot. If you can spare the time a code review would be another approach that could pay huge dividends over time. Imagine the situation was reversed, you knew how to use Photoshop passably, but were weak on aesthetics. What would you be looking for helpwise.

If it isn't so important, then I would hire a front end engineer and outsource design work. You can find passable designers easier than passable engineers, IME.
Woman passes 950th driving test
It's not too bad for us in Portland, OR but that's why we wanted to make the tool available for everyone. Hoping to get some good results that we can share next week. My guess: it's great for some folks and terrible for others (as it is in your case).
d'oh. Don't know how I missed that one, added it now.
Looks like a great opportunity for someone here!
How To Set Up The Ultimate At-Home Trading Station
I've upvoted you and would like to add some things. Being a programmer is a whole job. You can't expect someone to be awesome at design and know how to use source control (properly), bug/issue, javascript, browser incompatibilities, w3c validation, etc, etc.

Other fields of work are the same, btw. Architects can use hammers but I'm pretty sure only a few could handle a pneumatic drill properly and with safety.

The designers probably said they knew front-end coding because whatever they had to do previously was good enough for the past clients. The OP has higher standards, which now requires a professional to do it (shameless plug, I'm available for freelancing work).
Hands On with Google's Public DNS
Al Gore's talk has indeed been cancelled. His spokesperson says the cancellation is because of "all the events going on with the summit", whatever exactly that means. It could be that the real reason is the CRU kerfuffle, but so far as I can tell that's just speculation.

Most of the linked article other than the first two sentences (1) is bullshit and (2) has nothing to do with the cancellation of Gore's slideshow and book signing.
Why did they write this as if it were supposed to be an inspiring story?
My "argument" is simply to state that U3 is a measure defined so that it can rely on population (not sampled) data. This is done precisely to reduce the amount of processes error and bias.

The definition of U3 leaves little room for adjustment, and that is intentional.

If you were worried about "manipulation," then U4/5/6 are much more open to manipulation than U3 is.
Pretty straightforward to test.

With random labels under amazon.com:

OpenDNS:

[4:55pm:~] DIVISION:tqbf [0:1]% nsping -z amazon.com 208.67.222.222
NSPING 208.67.222.222 (208.67.222.222): Domain = "amazon.com", Type = "IN A"
+ [ 0 ] 55 bytes from 208.67.222.222: 29.254 ms [ 0.000 san-avg ]
...
+ [ 35 ] 55 bytes from 208.67.222.222: 28.894 ms [ 43.104 san-avg ]
^C
Total Sent: [ 36 ] Total Received: [ 35 ] Missed: [ 1 ] Lagged [ 0 ]
Ave/Max/Min: 43.104 / 232.379 / 24.222

Google:

[4:56pm:~] DIVISION:tqbf [0:1]% nsping -z amazon.com 8.8.8.8
NSPING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8): Domain = "amazon.com", Type = "IN A"
- [ 0 ] 100 bytes from 8.8.8.8: 71.366 ms [ 0.000 san-avg ]
...
- [ 27 ] 99 bytes from 8.8.8.8: 61.967 ms [ 86.705 san-avg ]
^C
Total Sent: [ 29 ] Total Received: [ 27 ] Missed: [ 2 ] Lagged [ 0 ]
Ave/Max/Min: 86.705 / 223.928 / 48.951

AT&T, via my home router:

[4:57pm:~] DIVISION:tqbf [0:2]% nsping -h www.amazon.com 192.168.1.254
NSPING 192.168.1.254 (192.168.1.254): Hostname = "www.amazon.com", Type = "IN A"
+ [ 0 ] 48 bytes from 192.168.1.254: 48.595 ms [ 0.000 san-avg ]
...
+ [ 20 ] 48 bytes from 192.168.1.254: 34.261 ms [ 36.207 san-avg ]
^C
Total Sent: [ 21 ] Total Received: [ 20 ] Missed: [ 1 ] Lagged [ 0 ]
Ave/Max/Min: 36.207 / 59.454 / 30.943

But, note the + in front of the OpenDNS result, which means we didn't get NXDOMAINs for random names, which is, all due respect, some bullsh*t right there. The results just for "www.amazon.com", which read straight from the cache and don't measure the performance of the recursive fetch:

OpenDNS:

Total Sent: [ 21 ] Total Received: [ 19 ] Missed: [ 2 ] Lagged [ 1 ]
Ave/Max/Min: 25.740 / 65.835 / 22.402

Google:

Total Sent: [ 21 ] Total Received: [ 19 ] Missed: [ 2 ] Lagged [ 0 ]
Ave/Max/Min: 36.985 / 64.553 / 33.540

AT&T:

Total Sent: [ 21 ] Total Received: [ 20 ] Missed: [ 1 ] Lagged [ 0 ]
Ave/Max/Min: 36.207 / 59.454 / 30.943

In case you're interested, compared to running dnscache on my local host, which is what I do normally:

Total Sent: [ 14 ] Total Received: [ 13 ] Missed: [ 1 ] Lagged [ 0 ]
Ave/Max/Min: 55.592 / 220.798 / 36.061

Third parties are faster, for obvious reasons (they have much better network connections, and using them minimizes roundtrips over my crappy network).

You can run these tests for yourself trivially. Just install nsping. I'm fond of it, despite how horribly coded it is.
http://www.lunarstorm.se/
Nice! I wrote up the little Java tool so that those poor fellows who didn't have nice cmd line tools could still participate :)
The guys who were really pushing Bespin forward went to Palm several months ago. The project looks great, but it may not have the same velocity right now.
Also a lot of companies don't want their employees to write code for anyone else and will actually see open source contributions as a major red flag.

FUD. I work for a very large corporation, and open source was definitely not a negative when hiring me. Many very important parts of our business are based on open-source technologies. (And many aren't, FWIW.)
Fire them and average productivity will appear to go up.
I think you are on to something.

No one in the nuclear industry thinks Yucca Mountain is anything but an idiotic boondoggle.
I'd worry more about all the bogus tweets, Facebook status posts, flickr pics, etc. that the motivated will be spamming the world with tomorrow. Seems like the best way to win is to stealthily compromise the websites and computer accounts of several of the major teams, then submit the balloon list before anyone gets their act together.

One of my friends at MIT called this site to my attention yesterday, and they were awful at security then. They sent your GMail/Yahoo password over the network in plaintext for a feature that automatically invited your contacts, as well as their password on the Django /admin/ page (both of these features seem to be gone now). They were also running Django with DEBUG=True, which was fairly entertaining (off now). I'd like to think that they got their act together partially as a result of my bitching, but who knows.
950 trials to get 30 out of 50 multiple choice answers correct? She must have a challenge that was not in the story.
Twitter + Talking = Great Web App
Tools for Competitive Intelligence
Same boat here. Judging by this thread our boat is getting quite crowded. Maybe the Slate people did their research using a facebook poll ;-)
"The one that really gets me is the assertion that the moratorium was some ego-driven “python is perfect” statement. That Guido/core dev think the language is “done” and that no new syntax or constructs are needed."

I'm pretty sure anyone who has assumed that didn't bother to read anything Guido has written/co-written on the subject,, including PEP3003.
I read it a bit like that but most of what I got out of it was an interesting way to structure a deal that I might consider should I find myself in a similar circumstance. I would like a private jet though.
> "which first counted normally in some series, such as addition by 2—“0... 2... 4... 6...”—until they grew restless, when it would suddenly add not 2, but 74, or 117, or some other, defiantly not-2 number."

is this because it was in fact computing a different but intended function, or was it a random bug? and was it a bug intentionally added by babbage or inexplicable?

i'm trying to figure out what the below quote means

> "This, claimed Babbage, represented the sudden, miraculous change—reality was pre-programmed with unexpected events which demonstrated the changing will of God."
Why we chose the Austin Area vs. elsewhere:

1. No Crime (NYC-Yikes)

2. No Personal Income Tax (Calif, Mass & NYC-Yikes!)

3. Low (all other) Taxes (Calif & NYC-Yikes!)

4. Low to basically non-existent business regulations & red-tape (Calf-Yikes!)

5. Reasonable Weather (Mass & NYC-Yikes!)

6. Reasonable Cost of Living (NYC-Yikes!)

Overall Austin seemed financially the best place because Texas does not tax any personal income and that is a big savings. Since both of us founders are from California on the minus side we have found Austin to be incredibly humid in the summertime and since we are still small we might give Seattle a try very soon.

Too bad the state government of California is not as business friendly as Texas, I’m sure a lot of companies would move back quickly.
Video:
http://sdruby.org/video/075_rails3.m4v (366 MB)
Ask HN: IE Javascript Engine Simulator?
I've got an ajax javascript that isn't running properly under all flavors of IE, according to several IE users and confirmed by http://browserlab.adobe.com

My environment is linux and Mac exclusively, so I cannot (directly) run IE.

Short of installing a Windows VM from virtualbox (or similar), are there any web-based javascript engine emulators where I could see IE's error console?
Another YC acquisition! Drool!
I am in Philly and I am using XIPWIRE and so are all my friends to make transactions with our phones. AS far as I know none of us have had any trouble and the fees are super low.
Anyone here use Lala?
One partial explanation which intrigues me, from the "what you can't say" files:

Historically (e.g. medieval times) the priesthood drew many of most intelligent/academic segment the population, as a compelling alternative to manual labor.

Beginning in the 4th century, Christian priesthood adopted celibacy, which later was made mandatory by the Roman Catholic Church, which sought to prevent inheritance from draining its coffers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celibate#Christianity

Meanwhile, Jewish Rabbis have been encouraged to marry and bring up children throughout this history.

Over centuries, you get a selective drift which results in a different distribution of intelligence among the populations. This explains in part the statistical incidence of academic achievement in the jewish population: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews#Achievements

Note that I'm speaking here of statistical measures. There are plenty of dumb jews, just as non-jews. But thousands of years of policy from the Catholic church has led to a population shift which has excluded many of the historically most academic in nature from procreating over 25 - 50 generations.

An explanation I first came across in Nozick's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy,_State,_and_Utopia
Hopefully one of their former customers with a copy of the "Private Network Edition" will leak it for posterity.
I don't know of any emulator, but I've had success running IE under Wine on Linux, using IEs4Linux: http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page

(Note: Google currently has a malware warning for that domain, so take reasonable precautions, don't use an unpatched browser or OS...)
I'd like to see more "chutzpah" examples outside of the usual US+Europe+Israel arena.
XIBs are hardly magic. Make some UI objects in a XIB. They're just serialized to the XIB. "Outputs" are just fields with values. "Actions" are just objects and method names.

What this solves is that it's a pain to position UI elements with hand-coded coordinates. It also gets in the way of localizing the UI. You can't always just use the same UI in Germany where the words are longer. With XIBs, you just copy the XIB, resize the text boxes as necessary, and enter in the localized text.

I would agree, however, if you are writing a game then you wouldn't use XIBs. It's not because XIBs are magic (they're fairly straightforward) but because a game UI is nothing like the UI problem that XIBs were designed to solve.
I should write sometime about the rationalist virtue of chutzpah, since I just now realized that this has been a major driving factor in my life.
There's nothing at all wrong with your test, it's just different from mine (to be perfectly honest, I didn't even read yours closely at first; I just wanted to bust out nsping).

By querying 1000 popular sites, you're really just testing the network and software performance of the three servers. Every one of those names is guaranteed to be in their cache. By randomizing the labels, you can factor the cache out of the benchmark. Does this matter much? Meh.

I agree with your performance conclusion (your ISP is fastest) with two caveats:

* AT&T's DNS sucks ass; it's fast right now, because it sucks and wants to screw up my benchmark, but 10 minutes from now it's going to go back to being nonresponsive. I'll happily surrender 50ms for consistant performance.

* The major win for third-party DNS (and the same win for running your own local cache) isn't performance; it's that it always Just Works.

No matter what Google says about 100ms responsiveness differences decreasing user engagement by 20%, I don't believe that 10-15ms is noticeable.
If e-mail had a baby: notification messages
Right.

It is interesting how (in the European and American context) we have not developed this idea much from the Enlightenment (Spinoza, Pascal, etc). We know this idea and yet cannot get past it.

The realization does not shake the belief itself, unless it was very weak to start with. The German philosopher, Ernst Bloch - I think in his work "Atheism in Christianity" - insisted the the 'atheist is very close to the true believer' in the sense that both are responding to the same impulse.

Darwin doesn't wreck my idea of the possibility of a God. And I do not mean in the sense of "Intelligent Design" or whatever it is called.

It seems hard to accept that if there is 'an allpowerful creator being thingie' that it would be completely beyond our ken. And any approximation would be an approximation of something infinite and thus as good as nothing. Less than the shadows on the cave in Plato's image.

This idea is at least as old as the combined JudeoChristian
tradition. Arguably (and I am not competent to argue this - just was taught it years ago by a Franciscan so take it for what itis worth), arguably the oldest book of the Hebrew Scriptures is Job. The oldest text. And to me the answer to this idea is in that book. (and if you happen to be in NYC check out Wm Blake's Job prints in the Morgan library exhibit)

That idea of god is incomprehensible, terrifying and at turns mild, beatific. Like those alternately anthrophagous and beatific buddhas on Tibetan or Mongolian tapestries.

Over the years a few things I have read have given me the same chill as the lines of God responding to Job from the whirlwind (Stephen Mitchell's translation). Like the ending of "King Lear" or Prince Arjuna looking over the plains at his immense enemy spread before him but then realizing his charioteer is Krishna. Moments of almost obliterating awe - the realization of the absolute otherness of creation of which we are a part yet separate through consciousness trying to get back...

Which gets to why I think Bloch was right. The atheist and the true believer they are human responses to the same impulse.

I do not get the in between - ie articles like this - is this a new idea?
"The loss of jobs could easily have led to parents switching..."

The point of speculation is that it doesn't require support.
I wouldn't want multiple collaborators editing my code all at once - I wouldn't know what they are doing. If I invite someone to collaborate I need to know what they changed before I redeploy the code.
The best alternative to hosted Etherpad is "EtherPad Private Network Edition": http://etherpad.com/ep/blog/posts/pne-pricing-store

Hopefully one of their former customers will leak it to the world.
Gobby is a free collaborative editor supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix-like platforms.

http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/
Never thought about it like that, it's a rather interesting explanation, but there is one assumption there:

That the most intelligent of the population would continue to choose priesthood event after celibacy was made mandatory by the Roman Catholic Church.

Perhaps the most intelligent of the population did not continue to choose the path of celibacy over and over again for 25-50 generations.
This example does not even begin to describe what Interface Builder is good for. Why should I write any imperative code at all to set the font, font-size, text layout, subtle drop shadow, font-weight, font-style, etc. ?

In anything but the most trivial applications you will simply be wasting time not leveraging Interface Builder as well as generating pointless code.

Interface builder is the CSS of Cocoa development.

EDIT: How about HTML+CSS ? ;)
I have to say, this looks like a major step up. The performance benchmarks are very impressive on their own, so that Rails 3 is also more flexible and easy to configure is great.
iPhone 3.0 devices can cache minified jQuery just fine - I've done some testing with an HTML5 offline app and they appear to have greatly increased the limits.

The jQtouch guys have been experimenting with this as well and have reported success: http://code.google.com/p/jqtouch/wiki/OfflineSupport
http://collabedit.com
Good for you - this is the way it should (and for most sane people, does) work. You ignore the tools until you understand what they're automating. One day, you'll get bored of writing boilerplate and trying to design the best UI by compile/run/repeat, and you'll go back to the tools for their appropriate uses.

It's always a benefit to understand exactly what's going on under the hood but I've seen some people take it too far, making this initial "I'm going to understand it properly" benefit into a curmudgeonly handicap^1. "I'm hardcore, I write all my UIs by hand! Those new fangled IDEs with their magic autocomplete - I keep my documentation on 430 sheets of fanfold printout! When I was young, we wrote all our code by hand using ed in Sanskrit, printed it out and hand soldered into hardware using tools we made by smelting our own iron!".

They're often right, to a degree - they can still write reasonable programs, and they'll likely have fewer defects than a person who just blindly uses tools. However, they often can't work in teams or adapt rapidly to new developments, and development change times are orders of magnitude above those who both understand the tools and when to use them.

1 - I'm not accusing the author of this problem, but the general tone does set a few alarm bells ringing...
Hmm, I think that guys with bigger brains aren't as driven by their libidos.
Are these benchmarks for real? Is there a 1.8.6 vs 1.9 thing happening here?
EtherPad had colored background for each collaborator, as well as a timeline slider and saved revisions so you could see who did what at each point.
This seems plausible.

How could we be sure IBM didn't pitch a similiar idea in isolation? I don't know what the RFP looked like, but it doesn't seem crazy that two teams would come up with similiar solutions to the design constraints, even with.a relatively unusual idea such as this one.
Yup, he is. Now all the ladies will be after him.
http://www.yourworldoftext.com/

Try, e.g.,

http://www.yourworldoftext.com/byebyeetherpad
wouldn't it make more sense to invest that money into a few hundred startups instead?

At $50K a pop, that's 340 startups that he could invest in.

Then 5 years later, when that 17 mil becomes 200 mil, he could setup that music trust.

I mean sure, he can still invest with whatever is left over from that 1 mil yearly cash out, but it's not going to be a game changer compared to backing 340 new startups.
As much as I like the "Ashkenazi Jews are a genetically smarter population" hypothesis, it's not sufficient to explain what's going on. It's probably necessary that some level of intelligence exists within a population for startups to happen, but it's probably a vanishingly small part of the equation.
There's also an extension for emacs that implements this:
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Rudel

It says it even works with Gobby.
Dude, if I were you, I'd drop everything I'm doing and try to push out a feature complete EtherPad replacement within the next few days. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who used to use EtherPad and are now stranded. Their product is tried and true and just vanished off the face of the planet because it was that good.

Why would you ignore that and try to carve a small niche for yourself for code reviews when the whole pie is right there for the taking?!

This will probably be the biggest opportunity your company will ever have in terms of user acquisition.