skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know, that was a more valid use than most. The question "Is X in category Y?" implicitly assumes, among other things, that X exists and that Y is a valid category.

If the validity of category Y is not established, then to argue whether something is or is not in Y is not too far from begging the question of Y's validity.
Try-javascript-emulated-ruby?
Yeah, all those damn authors who wasted their lives writing supposedly great works of fiction like Ulysses and The Grapes of Wrath and A Tale of Two Cities. They should have been digging ditches in Africa or volunteering at their local soup kitchen or whatever.

Give me a break. You think the world is really better served by you giving up on your dreams? It's a good thing not everything felt as you did or the world would be pretty bleak indeed.
One could argue that. But advertising is a product. If I sell a product to a person in France from my Canada based company, I do not have to pay taxes on that revenue in France.

Why should this case be any different.
Reptilian? What about human society isn't violent?

Violence is (generally) illegal and because of that, it's taboo. Allowing people to do something that is taboo without threat of repercussion sells. Allowing someone to say, race each other to see who can buy the most groceries fastest, can be done in real life without getting in trouble, so it's boring. If games could have gratuitous sex and drug use (beyond Grand Theft Auto), they would sell just as well if not better.

You don't get continues in life if you catch AIDS...
Killing someone, too, costs a lot of money. I can't remember the actual stats and I'm too bloody lazy to go look it up, but it was on the order of a couple of million. You can house a criminal for quite a long time before that money's spent.

Further, the current version of incarceration has been shown to not help rehabilitate, yes. I totally give you that. But the current version of incarceration was never designed to rehabilitate. It was designed to securely lock people away for a long time, and that's about it. In pursuit of that goal, we've turned our prisons into a very scary place that (IMHO) does more harm than good.

This isn't to say that every version of incarceration has to be evil in that same way. What if prisons were run with the specific incentive to rehabilitate people at all costs? This really hasn't been tried except in some very limited circumstances, though largely because it's political suicide. Sure, it may very well be the best thing long-term to spend a lot of time and money making criminals stop being criminal, but try explaining this to the father who saw his daughter raped by that animal while on national TV with him while you're running for president.
His defense that software patents are the same as all patents is a bit weak, I feel.
You forgot the '.org' :-D
Here's a secret HN toll free number if you don't want to even pay for a local call: (877) 808-4207
The Future of Content Web Sites: Content Factories and Content Communities
404. Perhaps this is it:

http://www.drawntosimplicity.com/?p=3
That's an interesting perspective actually. I'm not sure that I could do that duty in cold blood... If I was affected by the crime personally in some way then obviously it would likely be a different story.

Perhaps we could have a 'jury of executioners'? 12 potential executioners get called at random, the majority of them have to agree that the death sentence is applicable, all while knowing that one of them would be called upon to do the deed at the end...
Do you apply your indignation to bankruptcy to all cases? After all, bankruptcy is used strategically in business situations by everyone from General Motors, to airlines, to Donald Trump who usually come back with even larger undertakings, and often with more profits.
The article and its nested link http://www.progressivefix.com/spooks-in-the-machine-how-the-... recognize the "Sisyphean task" of trying to secure networks. No matter how hard you work at designing a good network, your inside users will somehow screw it up. "'With seven million systems in the DoD, think how many idiots there are bound to be,' one Pentagon cybersecurity official says."

Some security experts believe they can create the perfect firewall around an enterprise or government. It's not foolproof -- the firewall will either become vulnerable at some time or insiders will compromise security measures through idiocy or subterfuge.

After implementing preliminary security measures, e.g., firewalls, the best step any infrastructure maintainer should next do is to record and archive the massive flow of data through the network, computers, server programs, and applications in any enterprise. While one can't realistically capture all network traffic or every disk write/read, one can capture the "fingerprints" of many of these activities, at hardware-, server/application-, and at end-user levels, including for physical security devices. Once this information is stored and made queryable, an enterprise can pick apart and analyze their information flows and find vulnerabilities, learn to patch them, and find evidence of past misdeeds similar to newly discovered threats. Only with years of queryable archives of 200GB+ daily of log data can enterprises really take this step.

SenSage (http://www.sensage.com) realized this and in the early naughties developed the SenSage log data warehouse. The NSA, IRS, U.S. Navy, U.S. Treasury Department, and many health care informatics companies and commercial enterprises use SenSage for this purpose. Check out the "Government" and other sections at http://www.sensage.com/customers.
He might simply be assuming a high inflation rate.

At 10% inflation, prices will multiply roughly 8x in 20 years, so a trillion dollars would only be about $125B in today's dollars. That's only about half of Wal-Mart's market cap.
That's the first I'd heard that RMS wrote the first TECO "scope" command. As I (quite possibly incorrectly) recall that was the "q" command and it updated the full-screen display on a smart terminal. I knew he had become the first curator of popular Edit MACroS but that he did that lower level stuff is interesting news to me.
There’s a common stereotype that to be “crazy” is to be dangerous, but as stories like this indicate, the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of abuse than perpetrators.
So I like this idea, the project looks pretty cool, but the name...

Wasn't it already taken by a project that jnoller forked into multiprocessing? I mean, seriously, does no one google project names anymore?
The problem with using a javascript-emulated version is that it'd be way too limited, unless the dev went out of his way to cover much of the ruby language. This way, you can try the whole thing.

JS emulated would be good if it was just a tutorial, but it's a bit more than that.
The First Amendment Meets Cyber-Stalking Meets Character and Fitness
"...and the 1st Trillion Dollar Company"

I don't think he was
Ask HN:  How do you organize your git branches?
I frequently have several branches that I've yet to merge into master. I've been been keeping track of them in the form of a list of branch names in a text file. As I merge them in to master, I remove them from the list. Is there a better way?
If I had just kept growing at 20-25% annually I'd be over 260ft tall today.
Founder Dating (for meeting potential cofounders) event in SF
OT but yeah, I hate those things, and I hate having to put something over them to un-distract myself.
SparkFun Free Day Recap
It makes sense because the borrower has gone from having a positive net worth to a negative net worth due to the mortgage being underwater.

When they took out the mortgage, they were debt-free and had a mortgage equal to the value of their assets (the 1 million dollar house balances out the 1 million dollar loan), giving them a net worth of essentially $0. Now the house is worth $500,000 (but they still owe $1,000,000), so their net worth is essentially -$500,000.

Under these circumstances, it makes sense that the credit card company doesn't want to issue a card to someone that they know is worth negative a half million dollars, even if he did pay all his bills on time and can make the monthly payment on the amount he owes.
It is advantageous to them to have power, sure - but it doens't really directly contribute to their goal of organising the worlds information does it?

IMO they would do better to offer hard-to-turn down deals to energy companies in return for guaranteed clean power. (it would be a hell of a thing to have on your power companies adverts)
Looks nice.

Also, it might need to be pointed out that we already have Processing without Java: processing.js.

http://processingjs.org/
It is advantageous to them to have power, sure - but it doens't really directly contribute to their goal of organising the worlds information does it?

Is it any stranger than designing and commissioning the manufacture of their own server hardware as to achieve a more efficient ratio of price/reliability for their specific use-case?

There's a lot of information to organize, and doing it efficiently at scale requires moving quite a bit farther down the stack.
Well, an official spec for Ruby is in the works and there's already one for JavaScript (ECMAScript). Someone is bound to build a Ruby VM in JS at some point and then it'll be trivial to build a site like this.

The performance will be horrible, of course, but once that happens some other person will come along and run a subset of Rails (or some other Ruby web framework) with an evented db backend on it (for async callbacks to the server over HTTP) to run an app in the browser.

Which would be pretty cool, though not useful. (But don't let that stop you, whoever you are!)
The sensational thing is that they're preying on the mentally ill.
Facebook for iPhone 3.1 Is Good, But Not Good Enough For iPhone Battery
It's the most established just because that's where most corporations have incorporated. Corporations don't want any surprises when it comes to legal dealings, so it's very attractive to incorporate in a place where most plausible scenarios have been tried and resolved in court previously.

There are a number of legal reasons for incorporating in Delaware (in addition to the favorable tax situation):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_General_Corporation_La...

The short summary is: A long history of legal precedence, a separate court for corporate law which ensures a judiciary that is deeply familiar with corporate law, and the State of Delaware has generally corporation friendly laws. In the United States, corporations are held to the laws of the state they are incorporated in, even if they do business in all 50 states.
How does the credit card company know he's underwater?
What does it say about me that I parsed this sentence with "Google" as a verb and Hires as Hi-Res?
[Apparently not](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/amo3x/on_how_re...).

That's pretty embarrassing.
For 2009 they're listed as position 130 on the F500, so only 129 positions to go.

Take a trend and make some wild-ass extrapolation.

I'm very much impressed with what amazon is doing in general but I don't see them ever holding that top spot.
Processing just got more interesting...
He seems to assume that market cap moves in lockstep with revenue. A company's current market cap factors in expectations of future growth.
Guys, dig into the quoted research and you'll find they cherry picked data. For example, the USA with the question: "Suppose the top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder the worst possible life. Where on this ladder do you feel you personally stand at the present time?"

has a response of 7.3 whereas Costa Rica has 6.9. Beware of newsprints offering statistics.
Free Monthly Content Club PLR Articles and AdSense Sites
agreed it's largely an architecture issue, however poor EBS performance is contributing factor and he seems to go out of his way to say that it's not...
Here's a link to the developer's site: http://vladalexa.com/apps/osx/magicprefs/
If capital punishment is used, there's never a chance that someone spuriously found guilty might be able to be vindicated and get some semblance of their life back.

It's better that 10 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man hang.

Or at least that 10 guilty men stay in jail, no?

If it was possible to know with 100% certainty that every criminal who will be put to death was really guilty, then sure I'd be all for capital punishment. But until we perfect a mind reading machine, I'll stay on the "anti" side of the argument.

And won't that be a wonderful world to live in by the way, once the government can accurately read our thoughts. :)
Believing that the nature of knowledge is dogmatic; that there exists no pattern behind anything and that anything that is knowable must be memorised by rote and stored wholesale in the mind, rather than guiding principles abstracted from diverse experience refined and applied in multiple contexts.

I humbly submit that this single idea is the root of so much of the mental incompetence in the world today. It encourages the spread of religion and it's comparison with real science, it discourages attempting to comprehend and apply deep unifying principles between all things and a breadth of thought that comes far easier when one isn't afraid of exposing their preconceived ideas and views to the light of critical enquiry.

Last but not least, it encourages the emergence of a political class that at best exists purely to coordinate and rule the "underclass" specialists, and at worst offers no independent value themselves.
Yeah, and let's bring back debtors prisons while we are at it...

The general idea of these laws is that 7-10 years is a long-enough window into a persons financial state and habits to determine their current credit-worthiness and limiting this look-back window prevents lenders from subverting the purpose of US bankruptcy laws. There are no laws that force banks to lend money to people, only laws that limit the duration of certain items on your credit record.
I believe a Ruby VM is already in the works, but my cold addled brain can't google fu right now.
And by those standards, the market is as optimistic as OP; Amazon is trading at a P/E of 76.

Edit: I don't mean this necessarily as vindication for OP. A P/E of 76 seems very expensive.
First Chevrolet Volt battery rolls off the assembly line
Interface acts odd on Debian+Webkit+Chrome4.
As someone who has spent the last year and a half running a 200-(persistent)node environment on EC2, including multiple m1.large and m1.xlarge DB pools, I can assure you those stories stem from FUD and unreasonable expectations.

Yes, EBS is not very fast, especially compared to local disk. You can work around this, however, by configuring multiple volumes in a RAID configuration (as you have mentioned), or by scaling out with additional nodes. The size and workload of your database will dictate which is more cost-effective.

Spooling up many nodes to find the "best" one is completely unnecessary. In my experience, EC2 nodes have been remarkably consistent in performance. I won't say I run a load test on every one, but I will say that over 100,000 node launches, I've never had to shut down a poorly-performing instance that couldn't be attributed to a hardware issue (rare, and for which Amazon sends notifications).

Don't listen to the naysayers. Come on in, the water's fine!
"Ideally, you'd have to compare generalists who are mediocre in lots of fields with a specialist whom is very good on a field."

Isn't the whole point of the essay to suggest that generalists need not be mediocre at all? It's not obvious that the energy spread over several activities would be as efficiently spent on one specialist activity - if you do (without proof) assume that that's feasible, then that's actually begging the question...
Because people aren't born criminals. Cause and effect works throughout society. These monsters didn't make themselves, everyone had a part in it.
I'm rather baffled by this line, from the end of the article:

> The agreement does not require congressional approval.

How can that possibly be true?

EDIT: Some detail. The U.S. Constitution says that treaties made "under the Authority of the United States" are "the supreme Law of the Land" (Article VI). But it also says (Article II) that the president "shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; ...."

That last bit about the Senate would seem to contradict the above statement. Or perhaps ACTA does not require Senate confirmation, but then it isn't the supreme law of the land.
More like "Hello link-bait title that got a post with virtually no real content to the top of Hacker News in under an hour"
Ask HN: Looking for TTW music practice startups
I'm thinking of throwing in with some friends with an idea for a web business which facilitates training in playing musical instruments. I'd be grateful for pointers to any businesses already in this space.
>bullish future where our society continues to have plenty of natural resources (oil, food and fresh water)

Thorium would cover a great deal of that; the critical resource we need is optimism.
I'm glad that was cleared up. Techcrunch was this | | close to writing an article based on you speculation.
Is the Facebook phone next?
oh my god i played with that and never knew!
"Maybe Costa Rican contentment has something to do with the chance to explore dazzling beaches on both sides of the country .... and it’s surely easier to be happy while basking in sunshine and greenery than while shivering up north and suffering nature deficit disorder." Denmark, which comes in at number two in the happinsess index has beaches that are emtpy 10 months of the year because of the cold. Right now I'm looking out the window at a frozen sea. And I guess this ought to make Iran a very happy country too.

I think we can conclude two things from this article: The author likes Costa Rica, and he doesn't understand that correlation doesn't equal causation - like many of his peers in journalism.
From my earlier post : "the entire market where this person lives is down 50% from the time they took out the mortgage".

The building they are in was built in late 2005 in downtown San Diego. It doesn't take an appraisal to know that it's underwater - there are many short sales and foreclosures of identical units that can attest to that fact. If anything it's easier for the credit card company to see the mortgage balance then it is for them to see someone's income as that does not go on the credit report.

It's the _balance_ on their mortgage (the amount they owe, not the amount of the mortgage originally) - that is the problem.
Macros in DNA?
That would be HotRuby, http://hotruby.yukoba.jp.
Donald Knuth : All Questions Answered [pdf]
Learn to think better. (www.lesswrong.com is a good place to start, especially the sequences.) Learn new skills. Learn how the world works by reading books that challenge you and by seeking new experiences. Work outside your standard identity. Also, simply be kinder and better to the people around you in your personal life, especially your children, and be less conformist but more results oriented (most non-conformity tends to involve working from an ideology rather than trying to accomplish good).
DealExtreme Gadgets at the Right Price
"They should have been digging ditches in Africa or volunteering at their local soup kitchen or whatever."

No, what they should have done is written their books, then donated a large fraction of the money they earned from writing them. If you're that good of an author (keeping in mind that 99.99% of people aren't), you can help the world a lot more that way than by volunteering at soup kitchens.

"It's a good thing not everything felt as you did or the world would be pretty bleak indeed."

If everyone felt as Eliezer did- that it was better to spend at least some effort doing what the world needed most, rather than what happened to feel good- then maybe we would not have hundreds of millions of people in constant danger of starvation.
Amazon is leading two separate businesses that are growing very fast: online retail and cloud computing. It's sort of like being in the chain store business and the electricity business at an imaginary point in the 20th century when they both were about to take off.

Disclaimer:I am (stupidly) waiting for a local minima in AMZN's stock price to buy more.
Thinking of applying for a job at Google. Any tips or feedback on my résumé?
<i>you can't give them those 20 years back.</i>

And they still have another 20 to live. And they get millions of dollars in restitution. So, an innocent man is executed - possibly the worst injustice imaginable. Who get's to tell his children, his parents?

That's an interesting second point, a bit of a gamble though.
Yahoo Connected TV Platform Is Now Open
Given the points you've selected, it's hard to say that the author even cares to distinguish correlated data from anecdote.
_why's version of this site was my first exposure to Ruby. I was a convert (from Java) as soon as I got to map.

%w{apple pear banana}.map {|f| puts "#{f} is a fruit."}

This experience shows one of the fundamental truths of software marketing, incidentally: anything you can do to reduce the barriers to trying the software out increases uptake dramatically. Eliminating the install is powerful, powerful stuff.
I probably am not getting my point across very well.

Pushing issues upstream does not make them go away, it makes them someone elses problem. If that someone else doesn't take care of those issues then you end up having to solve them yourself.

And I've played enough with software raid that I know that configuring it to perform well is not a walk in the park, in fact I think it may be harder than getting a good hardware raid solution up and running on a dedicated box.

The nice thing of course of an EC2 setup is that once you've figured out how to do it you can do it again without much trouble.

As for the energy usage and the physical plant, that is entirely up to your way of using your servers. For instance I try to balance the quality of the service with the load on the servers to gracefully degrade the service when the load is at its peak (which is only a few hours per day anyway). That way I maximize my flat-rate payments on bandwidth and serverlease at a relatively small fraction of what it would cost me to get similar performance out of the various cloud suppliers offering. In a cloud environment those servers would be using just as much power and AC as they do today.

It takes me a little longer to get a server provisioned, on the order of 2 to 3 days, but that is 2 to 3 days, whether I order one, 10 or 100 servers. Very few businesses would ever need to grow faster than that.

Maybe my business is a lucky one in that it can make optimal use of a dedicated server setup but I see plenty of people choosing for a cloud based solution when if you run the numbers it makes very little sense.

The cloud comes in to its own if you have wildly fluctuating loads and/or jobs that need large numbers of machines for a relatively short period.

But for the majority of longer term high bandwidth uses I can't make the numbers work at all.
HN - Tuyển nhân viên bán hàng siêu thị
Tuyển nhân viên bán hàng siêu thị,Làm 2h/ca,Lương:160.000/ca
Funny, flexibility is touted as a Django benefit. It's easy to just not use all of those Django things as well.
This guy's blog posting suggests otherwise:

"Remember, the speed and efficiency of the single EBS device is roughly comparable to a modern SATA or SCSI drive."

http://af-design.com/blog/2009/02/27/amazon-ec2-disk-perform...

Perhaps EBS has improved drastically over the past year?