skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Jeff Darcy tears into this one: http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/?p=2555

"Letting fear of conventional storage drive the creation of 'solutions' that are just as complex without the benefits of being as general, as well tested, or as well documented is a mistake. (Open but undocumented and untested can be worse than closed, BTW, if the cost of reverse-engineering and fixing the implementation is greater than the cost of licensing would have been.) Such attempts generally lose even when considered alone, and even more so when the effects of fragmentation and incompatibility are considered."
I was referring to the overall environment, not any and every combination of 2+ people.

A homogeneous group certainly can be the best team for a given task. I'm only suggesting you have a sub-optimal environment if the only teams you can put together are homogeneous ones.
Spot on - they can certainly be used for similar goals (building powerful abstractions). But just as a horse and a bicycle can both be used to get places, but still be different, Ruby meta-programming and Lisp-style macros are very different, even if they are sometimes used to accomplish similar goals.

When you do meta-programming using Ruby, you're writing code that is executed at run-time (and can use runtime data). When you're writing Lisp macros, you're literally writing a code pre-processor: a bunch of little programs that walk over your code and expand it to other code before execution begins.

A great question is what the relative limitations are of both. I don't have a definitive answer, but I think this is one of the fundamental questions software engineering should attempt to answer - what abstractions can we build at compile-time, and what abstractions must be left for run-time?
Introducing the Google Model Your Town Competition
The author makes a huge leap,

"The core, implicit assumption behind Oracle RAC, IBM DB2, and many other database clustering solutions, is that failure can be avoided by purchasing high-end disk storage and using expensive hardware (fiber optics, etc). As can be seen from the research I mentioned earlier, this core assumption doesn’t correlate with the failure statistics. Hence I argue that the database clustering model is inherently breakable."

Taking the fact that drives fail and extrapolating that to mean that large drive arrays are "inherently breakable" is nonsense. Using an EMC Symmetrix as an example I am very familiar with, a large properly implemented storage array is far from breakable. Inside that box you buy is a whole collection of n+2, n+3 and/or n+4 components all built specifically to never, ever break. The only problem with this type of solution is it is priced in the multi-millions. Each.
Microsoft confirms first Windows 7 zero-day bug
> Windows has had a good auto-update system since Vista.

I beg to differ. The vista one might have actually updated your software to the new stuff though. But from what I remembered in XP, if you wanted the new windows media player, IE, or live messenger, you have to download them from their websites.

Also the only thing I remember from windows updates is the constant nagging restart prompt that sometimes closed unsaved work. You cannot call that good.
Be Yourself for a Living
Which pages in particular were you thinking of? We're only really using the modal displays for login, create-account, and 'flag-deal' right now.

We also added some intro words up top.

We have a pretty easy to use API that might be integrated with Centrl/Loopt/etc at some point in the future. But, I'd argue that the fact that retailmenot/slickdeals/fatwallet/etc are independent sites validates the 'deal finding' model and suggest we could surive individually as a niche site.
Sorry about that - it's fixed now.
Ask HN: provide feedback for loc.is
Loc.is is a short URL service for street addresses, and GPS coordinates. By varying the length of the hash you limit the precision of the address. Using the full URL path will define exactly where you are, however limiting it to 5 or 6 characters will only tell people which city you are in. For each location we will try to show you a few interesting events, facts or … What would you like to know about a given location?
This is an awesome idea... Why not just have it use the camera to OCR the front of the card?
A key point here is that players were mad at themselves, not the game, which is why Mario's tight, nearly perfect controls are so important.
That's what training is for. To the untrained eye it may seem hard to distinguish.
Craigslist blocks Yahoo Pipes
Using bit.ly doesn't change the text of the links. I think the problem was that a long link broke something on my site once and so I used bit.ly ever since. Plus I like stats and bit.ly gives great real-time stats.
I like this idea.

You could have expiring and non-expiring offers too, so that you could have a payment station that was not much more than a sign with a barcode.
Ruby [...] hits a wall that macros cross without even glancing back.

I'm not very comfortable picking sides like that - they're different things (as I said in the other post - horses and bicycles). Which is better for creating abstractions is a very difficult question, which I don't think we quite have the vocabulary to ask correctly.
I agree, but there's a second half that people need to consider. CS is missing out on women, but are women missing out on CS?

To paraphrase Phil Greenspun (from the "women in science" essay), we need to ask if CS "is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it?"

CS at a reputable university is hard. Seriously, seriously hard. I have no doubt that people who can handle this can also handle the academic rigor of a bio major followed by med school, and they sure as hell can handle an econ major followed by an MBA, or sociology major followed by law school.

So I'd start by asking: what are the women who are able to do CS doing instead, and would it be in their better interest to stop doing that and study CS?
Please do tell? Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (PEAA), Refactoring, Refactoring to Patterns, and the various Pragmatic books.
Raphaël is pretty fast even on Explorer:

http://raphaeljs.com/
As for Cox and Comcast, well, it sucks for them that Yahoo & Verizon decided to fight when they didn't. At least they were honest about selling your data...

To me the article reads as if these wiretaps are court ordered, which means that it's unfair to call this "selling you data". Even if they are allowed to charge a reasonable fee for the service, these companies have no legal means to avoid responding to these requests, so I wouldn't blame them for any abuses.

Which makes it all the more strange that two of them are fighting the release of this data. Their refusal makes this into a bigger story than it would have been otherwise, so any argument that they don't want to be publicly associated with this type of thing doesn't hold much water.

Could be that the legal departments just hate releasing internal data of any sort unless they're absolutely forced to, which is not altogether unreasonable.
Nark on Your Boss, Get Cool Cash
> emperor-has-no-clothes modern art

I admit I have a hard time "getting" most modern art. But seeing the actual pieces in person, especially some Picasso and Pollock, is quite a different experience than seeing dinky little prints in an art book.
Gift Cards. See things like http://www.swapagift.com/ And http://www.valutec.net/

Be careful though, under US law since 2001, you are probably committing a financial crime by doing anything that looks like anonymous digital cash.
There's no speed limit. (The lessons that changed my life.)
Why wouldn't it just work to use the camera and do OCR on the front of the card... seems like the little gizmo is way overkill for something fairly simple.
New PowerTOP features
How is that different from PayPal? To me the hardware is what Square is about.
The number of (laughs) in this interview makes me believe it is truly Japanese.
That rumored-for-years, never-confirmed-to-exist Apple tablet is just such a colossus that people are already predicting that the Kindle will be the next Betamax!

Other than that bold prediction at the end, a solid article. The succinct takeaway lesson from each product was a nice touch.
thanks, I'm a dummy
Re-check code for better efficiency.
Is it just me or does this seem part of the famed reality-distortion field?
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. If we wanted to study the physical properties of all hard drives that have been manufactured, then that selection bias might be relevant. However, most of us are only interested in the properties of hardware we can buy.
so this is like expressPCB + a sharing platform? i guess that's interesting. Not terribly new, though...

There's a lot of spelling mistakes in the original article, and it's bit incoherent.
Ten International Organizations Trying to Hack into Your Computer
One solution that will almost certainly get implemented is WebWorkers. From that you get string-only message passing (though it'd obviously be easy to do json-encoding of data in messages) between js processes.

That, combined with event based non-blocking apis for managing multiple tasks neatly covers more or less everything you can do in many other mainstream languages like Python and Ruby (excluding some magic in native code extensions).
Haven't you heard? The App Store approval process prevents any trace of evil from getting into the iPhone.

Also, most Windows PCs aren't PCI-DSS compliant but people still use them for online shopping and banking.
The purpose of the site as expressed on the about page ("We think choosing courses is hard, and we're here to do something about that.") seems to bear no relation to the purpose expressed on the homepage ("Share your notes. Sell your books. Make money. Get better grades. Dominate."). Of the two, I think the about page MVP sounds more interesting, although probably less profitable.

Out of curiosity, why do you have that RackspaceCloud logo in your footer? Are you affiliated with Rackspace somehow? Are you getting a referral bonus or something? Just big fans?
Continuous integration, going beyond continuous compilation.
This is PayPal for 'real life'. Eventually they could remove the need for the scanner and just let people bump to pay (with the appropriate security caveats). That's huge.
It does that to me too. My guess is that the app is trying to connect to their(knocking vid's) "master" server to setup a session and the app was not coded to gracefully handle the situation of getting arstechnica'd and it is unable to respond to the requests in a timely fashion and some killswitch gets triggered. Now they have to wait another 2 weeks and (maybe) another email to steve to fix it or wait until the equilibrium point is met where there are enough dissatisfied people quitting that will allow the other people on.

Or they just programmed it too bloated and it chewed through too much memory in the outset and the iPhone killed the process.

Who knows.
The Claim: Exercise More During the Day, and You Will Sleep Better at Night
Two looks at Dubai
here's some that go up to 1500 lumens: http://www.ledliquidatorsinc.com/PAR_38_12_LED_Cree_light_bu...

one thing to note is with LED's the higher power ones are less efficient, so the 800 lumen lights on that page use 1/3 the power.
Seems like a large valuation for a pre-launch startup....
What do you think?
Technology Review: Searching Facebook More Intimately
Thoroughly agree.

The costs of compliance are only so high because practitioners are supposedly scarce. The opportunity costs to industry have been much, much higher than the direct costs, though.
Right on. My point was simply that the type of Trie you use has an effect on the data's size in memory. A dual-array setup is pretty good at keeping the data small... There's very little pointer overhead and proximity is fairly good as well.
What were your thoughts on Acre (Freebase's app platform)?
12Sprints: SAP's "Google Wave Competitor"
Sometimes to get attention you need to make outlandish claims.

The results are still valid, though (and the UX is gorgeous).
The changes described in the article look good. However, were they A/B tested? While Amazon.com may look cluttered, they used A/B testing to evolve the site to what it is now.
This terrible slowness in IE with flot is because IE doesn't support the <canvas> tag, so it has to be simulated in javascript. In Firefox and Chrome Flot uses the <canvas> tag, and therefore native browser code, to do the drawing.
My writeup on why I think hotpotato is big for live TV
You don't actually need to use lead. The key phrase there is "effective strength" so if you have a massive supply of energy at your fingertips, it may be feasible to divert some of it towards the creation of an artificial magnetosphere similar to Earth's own.

Of course you could also use water (obviously in much greater volume), which is a good thing to have in large quantities anyway while you're in space, and is evidently not all that uncommon, at least throughout our solar system.
Pretty neat.

However it is not immediately clear what to put in the search box. It might be obvious but I actually had to think about it for a second :)
Tell HN: I've had an exit today!
I don't see the part where every joe schmoe can get a merchant account?
Even though CALEA is legal and pretty reasonable IMO, I wouldn't put it past some muckraking bloggers to push the "Verizon is making money by spying on you, switch to $SOME_OTHER_TELCO" (which they won't mention is also CALEA compliant).

Like this: http://xkcd.com/641/ but for CALEA.
Technology Review: TR10: Software-Defined Networking
That makes some sense. I would agree that it should be optimized to specify that JSON-able objects should be passable in such a way that it is if they are being fully serialized out to strings then deserialized again, giving the implementation the ability to do some optimization (which may or may not be a good idea but you'd have to try it to find out, best not to write yourself into a corner), but actually doing that in a library would be easy enough.

Given the way that JS performance has been moving, that would indeed be able to take on quite a workload, if you can run a decent number of "webworkers" at a time.
SAP to Launch Google Wave Competitor
The easy answer is: because they're missing at far higher rates than 'other intelligent men'.

But the deeper answer is: because western society thought we'd already patched that one. We had a long history of actively discriminating against women. But despite creating a stigma around that sort of behavior and 'officially' banning it, gender representation in our particular corner of society hasn't changed all that much. Not even the modest amount that other sectors have seen.

So the question of "where are the women" isn't only about the women, but about our seeming inability to fix society just by joining hands, singing kumbaya and declaring change.

If we'd gone through the trouble of a social movement to kick an industry bias against, say, stereotypical jocks, extroverts, or guys-who-know-how-to-talk-to-girls, then I suppose people would pay more attention to why those groups are still under-represented too.
OK. Well, I won't promise too much but would be happy to help you try out our initial offering. Feel free to email me or look out for my Ask HN review post in the next few weeks. Cheers!
> improve the weak links in a system, not the strong

How is the fact that a credit card number (given online or copied down by a waiter) gives armies of thieves continuous access to my account not a weak link?
Right, I don't understand the downvotes though, I was simply giving the only data point I had. Anecdotal though it is, from this, I don't see it as entirely unreasonable for someone in a larger city like NYC to make as much as my original post's grandparent suggested.

I also don't see any reason for two beggars talking amongst themselves (albeit loudly enough for others to hear) to inflate their daily income more than $100 or so, _especially_ if they're commuting (which costs ~$7/day) to do so.
HerWay.com - The Best Way to Date
Google will factor page load speed into search result rankings
Bah. Knuth wrote several interesting applications, including one that changed the face of mathematics more in the last 20 years than any other development. Where would math be without TeX? But beyond that, there's more to CS than "novel applications," and Knuth has been one of the most important theoretical computer scientists in the world, and was one of the fathers of the field, inventing asymptotic analysis of algorithms, inventing the parsing algorithms used by nearly every compiler on the planet, and on and on.
I didn't look into it too much - I was wanted to do it in Ruby and try out Heroku.

In the future I might consider building the app with ACRE - it looks rather interesting.
>I also don't see any reason for two beggars talking amongst themselves...to inflate their daily income

Well, the short answer is pride. The long answer would be that they do it for the same reasons that you or I would do it if we were asked our salary on a form, knowing that it would be compared, even anonymously, to others. It's the reason why HR firms basically ignore any data that asks an employee for their salary as being inaccurate.
RGB LEDs tend to have very unnatural spectrum with three narrow spikes, while normal white leds (blue led + some phosphor) has very wide spectrum (albeit different from incadescents, but probably better than common fluorescent lights). Other problem that I see with most RGB LED designs is that different colors are emitted from different spots, which tends to give unnatural shadows.

Three years ago I built LED lamp out of some no-name high-power white LEDs (~1€/piece) and last year I got Phillips LivingColors lamp and subjectively I find the light given by bunch of no-name white LEDs more pleasant.
Endless curiosity is important to avoid stagnation. However, there is still a difficult decision surrounding focus to be made when the "snowflake" is discovered. How do you decide when to turn off the exploration noise for a few months and build something awesome?
It is the new minimum-wage crank-machine economy. All those things are good things.

It would help the homeless to boot-strap themselves. And every human can always say, "well, at least I can work the crank machine if I have to."

It'll be like the new social security.
Women are treated differently in bad ways, but it's by their mothers mostly. Nothing to do with CS.

As you point out, various personality types are underrepresented in CS. The particular ones that are highly represented are less common in women. There is a reason for that, and yes it's bad, but the personality type distribution among women in general has nothing to do with CS.

PS My theory on feminism is that it said, "Men must reform." And so they reformed some. Meanwhile it did nothing to help women. Hence women are now worse than men.
When one snowflake sticks to another!
Is WordPress Killing Web Design?
Why do you assume 'socially mainstream' == 'less code'?

You seem to be implying that geeks only write code because the industry isn't socially mainstream.
I didn't criticize the idea. I up voted the story.

I just answered specifically to the comment, referring to the security aspect. Paypal was losing 10 million USD from fraud, so hope won't do it for the security.

"assume that people aren't going to be swiping their cards with random people"

Assuming, just won't do it.
Hiring at a Startup? Know Thy Weaknesses
Www.Radio Soul, Funk & Disco - MALE | soulparano.musique.com
This American Life did a podcast (can't find it at the moment) where they followed two guys who decided to become homeless, and beg for money in NYC while trying to write poetry and stories. Each guy easily cleared 60k, as I recall. So it's definitely doable.

In fact, another article I read told about a couple in Portland, Oregon that cleared 50k between the two of the begging.
Recession == No travel, hardware/software, or party budgets and friends get fired.

No Recession == Travel, buy stuff whenever I need to, free food, friends leave on their own terms.
My suggestion is to find a kindred spirit(s) who wants to co-found a business based on your ideas. Pitch the hell out of it, everywhere you hang out.

I left a longish comment on your post Matt with my story.
Yes, a brilliant idea. It seems that much of the design in video games is to trick the player into failing. This was a case of tricking the player into success.
I'm quite interested in getting into the business of switching local small businesses from proprietary PBX systems to open VoIP hardware.

It's a pretty saturated and rapidly commoditising business. I wouldn't bother.
Reminds me of Mike Cassidy's: Speed as THE primary business strategy
http://venturehacks.com/articles/speed
Why pay anyone, in essence, purely to suffer?

(see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy)

What would be wrong with a similar machine which dispenses, say, one dollar per retina scan pattern per day?
The original Donkey Kong is easily the hardest and most frustrating video game I have ever played.
I see what you're saying about it being unfair to call this selling data, but I can't help but look it at that way when they are charging $2500 dollars and up for tap. There is definitely a difference between being compensated for the time it takes to do something and profiting off of it, regardless of whether you had to do it or not.
Unfortunate, but predictable... as pointed out in your previous thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963634
http://www.kongregate.com/ already has a system like this in place.
You probably would have scored higher and gotten a useful response if you had omitted the comment about your attention span.
Well, the problem here is that we're talking about a possible run away greenhouse effect that will condemn most of humanity to death. The point being is that you must act now in order to stop it and that this is the rational approach even if you do not have conclusive evidence. Your gamble is an unacceptable risk, or so the principle would say.

I spent a couple years living in mainland China with pollution so bad that you literally could barely see across the street. On many clear sky days you could look directly at the sun with no issue. I flew over the country to different cities dozens of times and always the entire country was covered in a thick smog for thousands of kilometres. We really have no idea here in North America of the scale of things going on. And China is going to massively increase their emissions in the coming decades.
> Simple tricks to avoid attracting attention from casual observers are still useful.

Correct.

And methods such as molding cocaine into faux PVC pipes are not, precisely because they are interesting/memorable and end up documented in customs agents' handbooks.
Questioning the merit of meritocracy
This is inspiring, and it reminds me of an incident in my life. I went to Union Station with a friend to catch trains home for Christmas during my freshman year in college. He was going to Iowa, I was going out west. His train was six hours before mine, so I went along, as the school was pretty much closed down by that point anyway. I took a book along that was the text for the second quarter--Introduction to FORTRAN (yes, all caps those days). I think it was by McCracken. By the time the train had left, I had consumed the entire book and was ready to program. My career has never looked back from that time.

That is what I like about this community as well. There are no artificial barriers to learning or to getting anything done. You don't need credentials or permission. It is in your hands.
I do remember that the syntax made spaces were unnecessary.