skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My guess is Apple's tablet is primarily designed as a competitor to PC net books. People have speculated about it being a MacBook replacement but there's a huge difference in the type of consumer buying a $350 net book and a $999+ MacBook. I think Apple has insulated their computer business from being cannibalized from lower end devices. Lots of people say "if I already have an iPhone and a MacBook why would I want a tablet?" and the answer probably is you don't. This product is not aimed at you. It's for the people who don't want a $999+ MacBook and are currently buying PC net books instead. As such I think the price will be <$499 (maybe a bit higher on launch just to cover supply & demand)
Facebooks People organized web
But that's my point - aren't they really deriving their advertising income as, when, and where a user clicks on an ad?

Google Ads are different from regular advertising since the revenue accrues at the time the user clicks and located where that transaction occurs, which is on the user's desktop (i.e. place of delivery).
So? We're talking about building iPhones apps today, not two years from now.
I've worked with 2 different companies. One (big name, big time) has rigorous build/commit processes, the other one (startup) uses "checkstyle" and "findbugs" but lacking of code-reviews process and best-practices/standards.

During my time in the first company, I thought there were too many bureaucracies/processes revolving code policies.I felt that those rules were slowing me down. After I spent time with the second company, I took my words back. We wasted time arguing about code-style and best practices/standards. People checked-in code as if they were cowboys in the wild wild west. At first it felt fun. Later on during the bug-fixing period, the pain and agony start.

I learned my lesson.
15 years ago Microsoft held a monopoly on desktop operating systems. Apple is nowhere near a majority in the SmartPhone market today. I think there's very little chance they will ever hold that type of dominant position in the SmartPhone market so whatever they choose to do with the iPhone & App Store doesn't really impede the consumer's ability to choose an open platform. I think choice is a good thing. If someone wants an open platform they can get it. If someone wants a nicely packaged, but extremely functional and trouble free, platform Apple will sell it to them.
Maybe it's really 'management engineering'. The application of science and math to the practice of building businesses.
Not sure how this relates to what karzeem has said. You're right, taxation can shape behaviour. So what do you suppose it's saying here? Let's tax and discourage a productive part of society - or at least a part that helps people get things done faster to subsidize an industry (that's already being protected and promoted by government) that people are not interested in enough to actually support with their own money?

Let's also not forget Quaero that the French tried to create as a counterbalance to supposedly American centric search for a total estimated amount of 293M Euros over 5 years! If the French government was that concerned about certain favored industries, why not just put their money there?
The funny thing is that folks who are deeply underwater on their mortgages are _already_ screwed with regards to credit - even if they have a good credit history and are up to date on all payments. I know someone who has high 700s credit score that was recently turned down for a credit card, the reason given was that the balance on their mortgage was too high. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for them and they have decided to do a short sale on their property.
As per the comment above: they are already taxed on their advertising revenue.
Are his super() complaints really a problem in practice? I for one have always disliked the non-DRYness of typing "super(C, self).method(arg)", and Python 3's super() really improves on that for real-world cases.

I haven't done much Unicode string transformation, so can't comment much there. But why can't Python 3's str.lower() or .upper() replace one letter with two? As for the locale thing, could it be solved by the str.lower() and .upper() functions taking an optional locale parameter? As for internal encoding, I'm guessing they'll switch to all-UCS4 over time.

I really like all of the changes they're making in Python 3. Though I admit I haven't switched yet -- waiting for the 3rd-party support to catch up. Looks like it's happening though.
Really? Wow.

And people are complaining that the crash was caused by under-regulation? How about first removing all the laws which force banks to lend money to folks who are unworthy of credit?
You keep saying the same thing again and again. It's still not correct.

The companies that own the search engines are already paying tax on their advertising revenue. See other person's comment above.
Tell HN: Co-Founders MeetUp has startups, needs co-founders ;-)
The Silicon Valley Co-Founders MeetUp has its next meeting on Jan 21. We have plenty of people with startup ideas signed up, all wanting to meet potential co-founders.

So if you are interested in getting involved but don't have an idea, please consider attending!
Probably the most persuasive essay I've read in favor of patents is by pg.

http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html

I'm still not in agreement, but he he makes a good case.
The link to the MeetUp is http://www.meetup.com/Co-Founders-Wanted-Meetup/calendar/119...

It takes place at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View.
Banks aren't a good example. By policy you can walk and demand money and they'll give it to you. They'll prosecute your ass after the police track you down (which generally doesn't take long).
I do agree with you, but at the same time those individuals can influence the thoughts and actions of the greater mob by their own words and actions.

I think that everyone has the responsibility to live the best life they can, and encourage others to do the same...
"I often saw the best practices of general management fail startups."

Even a quick reading Peter Drucker offers a lot of wisdom for managing a startup.

"The Effective Executive" and "Innovation and Entrepreneurship" have a lot to say about managing time, priorities, and posteriorities (what you are NOT going to do or organized abandonment) that are highly relevant to getting a startup off the ground and growing.

For a shorter piece that talks about value creation and the need to focus outside of the corporation to create value, his "The Next Information Revolution" (published in ASAP but available here http://www.versaggi.net/ecommerce/articles/drucker-inforevol... ) is worth a quick read.
Try Ruby (in your browser, now with 1.9)
That makes no sense. Being underwater doesn't mean that your mortgage balance is too high, it means that it's higher than the value of the house. A credit card company would have no way of knowing the value of the house unless they had an appraisal done. What they likely meant was that either the balance or the monthly payment (or both) was too high for his income.
Social Pressure and Charity = Do not Knock Registry?
Clearance takes about 6-9 months. Foreign associations and illegal activities get a lot of attention.

They'll ask about drug use. Don't lie. Any illegal drug use in the past 12 months is disqualifying, but it's better to fail on this and get the clearance a year later than to get caught in a lie and have that on your record. (I doubt they'd throw you in jail, but a lifetime ban isn't unlikely, from what I've heard; whereas it's unlikely that you'd be turned down for smoking pot 3 years ago.)

Underage drinking (even within past 12 months) won't lock you out but you'll be expected to be sober during your time of active clearance, up to your 21st birthday.

A lot of people will be interviewed whom you didn't supply. For example, your hall director if you're a college student, and possibly a professor or two. Your references will all be asked for references.

Based on what I've heard, I'd guess that the acceptance rate for born US citizen without criminal records or recent drug use is 60-75%, but that's just a wild guess.
Cramp: Asychronous Event-Driven Ruby Web App Framework
Webmasters have a ton of choice there. Even with adsense you can filter out specific ads, change settings to prevent image/flash ads, etc.

If the webmaster cares, they can modify it. And they really should know what ads are showing on their own site.
I simply said that because he said the motivation from this proposed tax stems from the misbelief of the zero sum game in wealth creation.

However, from the article it seems it is more a way to to stimulate certain behavior (i.e. cultural developments).
The Happiest People
The list of ACTA countries is growing (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agree...):

United States, the European Commission, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, Canada, the European Union, Jordan, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Singapore and United Arab Emirates.

It isn't going to be easy to escape.

EDIT: spelling
IMO, no flash is mostly a deal-breaker on media type stuff. Watching or listening to stuff. The application side of flash is smaller.

I imagine Apple has it's own ideas for how media on the tablet should work.
My Grandfather Before Computers
Tuning TCP parameters for the 21st century
Yes, sure, just we don't have enough information to see the "continuum" instead of the discrete parts.
What is the difference between USB 2.0 and USB 3.0
There are no areas of computer science that seem to rely on patents to make investment worthwhile. The closest would be compression I guess, but unpatented video compression techniques seem to be advancing just fine. The inherently low cost of computing research means there is a massive amount of invention without the help of patents, and in those circumstances patents are just getting in the way.
I can't help but be very excited about these Cortex A9 boards coming out. The ARM processors are getting better really fast. The power / performance ratio compared to the Atoms is just so good, it's almost ridiculous.

A few years ago we had the iPhone, then the 3GS came with the Cortex A8 processor and the speed improvement is enormous. The Cortex A9 has an even better performance / Hertz ratio. Anand expects a similar (iPhone -> 3GS) speedup is possible with the Cortex A9.

The Tegra has 2 cores, but even more cores are possible. According to Anand, the chips can also scale to beyond 2GHz on a 28nm design. There are many chip producers creating chips on the Cortex A9 design, there is enough choice and difference between chips to create decent competition. With the way the ARM designs are licensed, silicon bakers can add whatever functionality they want, targetting smartphones, tablets, netbooks, whatever.

Most companies have chip samples and development boards ready by now. I can't wait to see what the A9 will bring us in the next 2 years.
That is not the impression I got. The interviewee read the questions off of a worksheet. That indicates to me that 1) these are not actually his questions, and 2) he does not actually care about the answers.
Amazon will be the Largest Company in the World and 1st Trillion Dollar Company
What I hear when you "just want to reach out directly"
We Are All Spartacus Now
If the data isn't "optional" (i.e. if there's a cache miss, you can't just go to a traditional database for a somewhat higher - but acceptable - cost), "memcached with persistence" approach isn't going to cut it. You now have a distributed system with state, which is a much more difficult problem.

That's why there are so many distributed storage systems: there's no "one fits all" solution that can handle every theoretical corner case (even Google hasn't solved that). In my (biased) view, the eventually consistent stores (e.g. Dynamo-inspired ones or even "Friendfeed/Facebook model" of sharded and replicated MySQL databases storing Blobs) do seem most reasonable for web-type problems.
I understand what "being underwater" means - thanks though. The facts are that the credit card companies don't need to do an appraisal - the entire market where this person lives is down 50% from the time they took out the mortgage. The person maintains a good income and can easily pay the mortgage payment, it just doesn't make sense any more for them to throw good money after bad to hold on to a FICO score that really doesn't get them credit any more.
Quite seriously.

I use memcachedb in my deployment of A/Bingo (it isn't limited to that), which avoids using a SQL database because I wanted it to be blazing fast for people who having significantly higher traffic sites than I do. The typical case performance on my site is fantastic. The worst case performance is an abomination -- when it flushes the site essentially pauses for all users for five seconds.

This is tolerable for me, but only just. The reason I use memcachedb as opposed to vanilla memcached is because I was worried about persistence in the event of a server failure, but given that I can count resets of my server over 3.5 years on a single hand, I might just decide "In the event of a server failure, I lose any A/B tests in progress and have to start over. Oh well!"
It definitely looks as though they ended up having to manage it themselves.

They're not "manag[ing] it themselves" -- it's a gigantic stretch to say that software RAID on an instantly-configured EBS volume is remotely equivalent to specifying, ordering, building, installing and maintaining a number of RAID arrays in a data center.

Basically this seems to put a fairly low upper limit to using 'the cloud' for something a little larger before you get back exactly the same kinds of issues that you were dealing with when using self-hosted hardware, only at a higher price point.

This is ridiculous. The primary issues with self-hosted hardware:

- Energy usage. Data centers only have so much power and cooling to spare, what's available costs money, and you constantly have to monitor/juggle utilization and search for more energy-efficient hardware, which leads to the next issue ...

- Physical plant. You often need to buy it well ahead of time to ensure that you'll have power and space available for expansion should you need it. You need to wire that space, buy switches and routers, and that leads to the next issue ...

- People. You'll need people to order, build, and install those servers. You'll need people to swap out dead components in those servers. You'll need trained people to install PDUs and console management systems, to configure and run your switches and routers.

EC2 and similar pushes these issues upstream. You can manage your servers in software. You don't have any routers or switches to manage, you don't have to order, build, or install hardware. You don't have to expend significant capital outlay on servers or rack space.
But what's the dilemma?
The point is that the cost of defending against all possible attacks may very well be too high to be worthwhile. If you argue that this is impossible, consider the extreme case where the cost is equal to our GDP (or an appreciable fraction thereof).
Clearly you've never been to the bay area.

Apparently dating sucks, IT careers suck, housing sucks, transportation sucks, (... list continues ...) if you've been to the Bay Area.

I have an alternative explanation which is quite a bit shorter...
Clever! But in all honesty, I was a little disappointed when I discovered that Ruby was not being emulated in JavaScript or something similar. Just bouncing the entered text back to a server-side instance of IRB instead...
But they're not paying tax in France, where, one can argue the advertising revenue originates as and when the user clicks on the ad since it is only then that the good is considered delivered (very different from traditional advertising).
Actually, Top Secret is not very high (e.g. well below DOE Q or of course TS/SCI).

Basically, you just have to be honest in your application, and of course you have to be a reasonably trustworthy person (and not black-mailable; e.g. it's OK to be GLBT, but not in the closet).

As noted elsewhere in the comments, you'll have to fill out a long form, people you know will be interviewed (my knowledge of all this is mostly from supplying interviews for a couple of friends), and as noted it will take some time. You won't be able to work on your actual project until you get the clearance, which many find annoying, but for this sort of job perhaps they'll have you learn the development environment, work on tools, etc. (I had one friend give up on a LLNL sysadmin job because he couldn't do anything to speak of.)

If you're concerned about accepting a job that you might end up being let go from because you didn't get your clearance, check out this page: http://www.home.earthlink.net/~lastone2/individualsales.html and the general web site of LeRoy A. Stone: http://home.earthlink.net/~lastone2/home.html.

He provides a service that will give you an estimate of how likely it is you'll get a clearance. I used him back in 2003, although his assessment became moot when my job offer essentially went poof.

One really important aspect of this job: it's a two-fer in terms of having a long career in software. The embedded community has more respect for gray hairs than any other, and work that requires a clearance by definition can't be outsourced overseas or given to H-1B or L-1 visa holders.
It is a lovely country well worth the visit and they deserve a lot of credit for their environmental conservation. But it's not as though they've done away with poverty. I've seen families living in shacks in Quepos just down the hill from sprawling expat mansions in Manuel Antonio. (Though even those families did seem pretty happy).
But they don't get taxed in the jurisdiction where the revenue originates (as and when the user clicks on the ad).
It would be much better if there were a "trade-in" button on the textbook's description page. Instead, there is a restriction that the user has to search through the textbook portal page in order to see the trade-in button. I'm not sure why this restriction is in place, unless they wanted to limit the number of people using the option at first.
Not exactly. It varies in different states, and on whether the mortgage was for purchase money or refinancing.
Why do they have the most established corporate law? (Please explain for a non-American. Thanks!)
Domains of scientific inquiry can be roughly considered along two axes: ability to partition the world into context-free discrete objects, and ability to test predictions by direct intervention.

The former includes the type of abstract simplifications that people laugh at physicists for ("consider a spherical cow in a vacuum..."); the latter refers to the naive concept of the scientific method as an iterative "hypothesize, experiment, repeat" approach.

Physics sits far in the "easy" corner, which is why it's the shining city-on-a-hill ideal of scientific success. Cosmology and the like are way down the "non-intervention" axis, where testing is awkward. Down the context-heavy axis are things like biology, studying systems that can't be neatly decomposed.

In the far "difficult" corner, both analysis and testing are sufficiently difficult that constant vigilance is necessary to prevent the entire field from being overrun by convincing-sounding bullshit. Evolutionary biology is the only obvious success story I can think of in this quadrant, and even that has been intermittently plagued by dubious ideas (e.g., the "group selection" fallacy).

To take something like "management science", and do actual science is not just hard, it's fantastically difficult and requires a level of clear-thinking rational discipline far beyond the demands of most fields.
If the media ever report on your life, you will find that it's even worse than you think.
Seven of the most fun days of my life were spent on a vacation in Costa Rica.
Everytime I see a 'generalist' vs 'specialist' post like this, I think its wrong to compare generalists who are very good in a lot of different areas to specialists that are very good in just one of them.

Ideally, you'd have to compare generalists who are mediocre in lots of fields with a specialist whom is very good on a field.

Or, in your case, like you said (being an accomplished practitioner of many different fields), comparing that to being like Marie Curie or Einstein, to quote your examples. That is, if you took all the time and effort from being a writer, orchestra musician, etc, and put it into a single field.

Even if you can say your life's been very fulfilling (and you're probably right), its a hard argument for the generalist to say he's better than the specialist in the specialists' field.

As for 'you can't be good at everything', that really means 'you wont be as good as you can be at something if you keep learning everything'. But putting in lots of work on everything obviously make you good on everything.

But even mozart, being very talented a musician in a young age, had to choose (at age 4?) the violin or the piano (he chose the later)
"They are currently valued at about $50BN, but are growing at about 20-25% annually and will continue to do so for the next few decades."

Hello, unfounded assertion...
"... in 20 years maybe. They're currently worth 5% of that though". Paraphrasing the article of course.

At current trading, Wal-Mart is worth just over 204B, just for comparison.
Beautiful Code: The evolution of an iterator
I tend to go back and forth on this issue, but I would pose the question that if we made it mandatory that everyone had to serve out capital punishment duty (i.e. you get called to pull the trigger, inject the syringe, or whatever and if you refuse you risk punishment by death yourself) as we do for jury duty then would you be willing to do your civic duty? If you are, what does that say about us as a society? Do we go back to the good old days of public hangings and stonings? If not, then what is so different about paying tax dollars to support the killing of someone?
Virtual memory support is currently being added to Redis so that it won't need to fit everything in RAM either. I'm sure antirez can provide some better info on how it'll work.
With software it's really hard to say what below cost actually is. Amortized fixed cost, or just the variable cost?

If you are talking about the latter then no, it's probably not dumping. If you are looking at the former I bet it's not so clear cut. WinXP development and all of the associated cost (such as the loss-making products like IE that help keep WinXP in it's market position) would have been pretty expensive - and the expenditure is still going on today thanks to things like security support and IE upgrades.
On comments and social interaction
I've got to admit that the 1.9 sticker and the "BETA" text don't really blend in with the existing look of the site.
Again, you're not making any sense. Let's say the mortgage that the person has is for $250,000. How does the fact that my market has supposedly lost 50% now mean that my mortgage is "too high"? Perhaps the house was worth $1m when I bought it and is now only worth $500k. Would the credit card company still think the mortgage is "too high"? It's still only 50% of the value of the house. I think you're missing some data.
More and more I feel that starting a new country is a really good idea.
"The housing market is growing 20-25% annually and will continue to do so for the next few decades."
Interesting.

But the auto-scrolling Twitter display is incredibly annoying.
Exactly the same way that if Amazon sells a product to someone in Africa, from their USA based website, Amazon do not have to pay taxes on that revenue in Africa.
Pyprocessing: Processing without Java.
Easier to get started and less buggier than ruby-processing and clj-processing.
Yeah, too many fonts.