Hacker News Reader

simon_kunon Polymaps - A JavaScript Library for Image and Vector-tiled Maps

I especially like the tiled approach to data streaming that Polymaps implements, though I wonder if it's inefficient if you have really large polygons and a small grid (I'm assuming that if a polygon intersects the grid it'll be streamed rather than being chopped up).

Get ready for all these client side 2D mapping libraries to get a big speed bump with the onset of HW-accelerated Canvas/SVG rendering.

The online mapping world currently dependent on tiling to get literally anything done. It would be nice to see some variety.

Maybe the ability to handle more data faster will spur innovation in lightweight GIS data messaging formats.

simon_kunon Announcing Micro Instances for Amazon EC2

The real interest is in seeing what the downstream value added services do with this.

For example, I'm interested to see what changes this makes to the Heroku offering. It seems to be a perfect fit for their product.

simon_kunon Missile Command in less than 1k of JavaScript

You may like these AS3/Browser JS benchmarks: http://jacksondunstan.com/articles/712

simon_kunon What's new in PostgreSQL 9.0 - a User's Perspective

pgAdmin3 + SQLEditor (http://www.malcolmhardie.com/sqleditor/)

simon_kunon What's new in PostgreSQL 9.0 - a User's Perspective

datapoint: I've been using PostgreSQL (and it's GIS extension PostGIS) with Rails for over a year now. Some minor issues along the way, but never ever going back to MySQL.

simon_kunon Calacanis vs DHH on This Week in Startups

The interesting bit is where David gets sucked into Calcanis' "more money is best" angle (and in some respects, JC's brain really lucked out on picking up on this weakness).

From what I can tell, DHH is much more focussed on Quality of Life than simple monetary gain which was only briefly touched on (if at all).

Good discussion.

simon_kunon 26-gigapixel panorama of Paris; try zooming in near the horizon

The thing that gets me about most of these flash "explore" widgets (including Street View) is that they don't update the URL with the pitch/yaw/zoom/lat/lng information, making the cool stuff you find pretty hard to share around.

simon_kunon My Recommendations for Ruby on Rails Hosting Services

I can't speak highly enough about Brightbox (the managed VPS service Antonio recommends).

Somehow they have managed to tread the fine line between a very comprehensive and well configured service with great addons (Comprehensive management Gem, load balancers, CDN and managed very high performance Master-Master MySQL cluster for all accounts) and flexibility (root access, install what you want on the boxes, no need to re-learn "their way" of server management).

I'd like them to add PostgreSQL and US locations in the future, but for a high-speed, reliable host they can't be beaten.

(A satisfied customer)

simon_kunon AWS Price Reductions and Free Inbound Data Transfer

It would be nice if they included PUT's into this equation too. Many large datasets are not one big file, but billions of smaller ones.

I realise it raises the offering out of the bandwidth arena and into actual server capacity to handle the PUT's, but offering free bandwidth in and still charging per PUT action is kinda misleading (and could really ruin someones day if they read it wrong)

simon_kunon Ask HN:What do you use for searching for scientific articles

Basically, you need 2 things.

1) A better search interface and reference manager. If you are on OSX, Papers by Mekentosj is a fantastic option. 2) A citation search engine aggregator specific to your field. Something like Web of Science/knowledge is one of the best for my field, but I need to go via a Uni/large organisation as it's waaaay outside my price range.

Site note: In this day and age, these aggregators are a complete and utter racket. Unfortunately it's the way things are while academia finds a lingua franca other than number and status of "peer reviewed" journals for its funding orientated core business model.

simon_kunon Poll: YC Startups, do you use Django, Rails, PHP or Other?

I use both rails and django, and my impression is that although both frameworks were released at roughly the same time, they are both at very different points of the hype curve, with rails pulling out of the Trough of Disillusionment, and django rising to peak hype.

simon_kunon Microsoft-Yahoo Deal Struck, Will Be Announced Within Next 24 Hours

er, it's only for Bing to provide search results. Yahoo's been here before with Inktomi.

simon_kunon Ask HN: Suggestions for learning statistics (& prob) really fast?

Well written, humorous intro to statistics using R: http://www.amazon.com/Statistics-Introduction-Michael-J-Craw...

simon_kunon Rails 2.3: Templates, Engines, Rack, Metal, much more

One of my favourite graphs for explaining the power of git is the Rails traffic graph at github: http://github.com/rails/rails/graphs/impact . Track right until the beginning of April '08. That's when Rails moved to git.

simon_kunon Amazon’s Kindle 2 Will Debut Feb. 9

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/ebook/

Not the right price, but the PDF support is build right in. alt.binaries.e-book.technical will finally realise its promise.

simon_kunon France's birthday gift to 18y-olds: A subscription to the newspaper of their choice

Yeah, but 18yr olds?! come on!!

simon_kunon France's birthday gift to 18y-olds: A subscription to the newspaper of their choice

Does a state that shores up an ailing media form because of personal links and dresses it up as a "present for the children" not bother anyone a tiny bit? Newspapers are dead, get over it.

simon_kunon Building a Web App in 1 Hour For Promotional Purposes (IsHilarySwankHot.com)

Take the caps out of the URL and look again...