skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It fails to definitively show that we're not getting what we're paying for because a graph such as this only shows correlation.
Just buy one. Ubuntu is very slim to begin with (~4gb) and it's very easy to configure the filesystem to keep core files on the SSD and other stuff on a magnetic disk, e.g., symlink /home/kristianp/Music to /media/bighdd/Music or even just mount the hdd as /home. (Do they still make laptops with two drive bays? Used to be common but now that I think about it I can't recall any recent models with this. Maybe the Taiwanese brands? Asus, MSI, etc?)

I have a 16gb drive in my wife's netbook that has plenty of room still (no big music collection, though.) Our home computer has an 80gb drive, 70gb for Win7 and 10gb for ubuntu. Just to give you an idea, next time you boot up Ubuntu (karmic) watch the splash animation, the one that says "ubuntu" with a pulsing white progress-bar like thing underneath. The animation only cycles once and then gnome is instantaneously loaded and sitting idle (autologin is on.) Rebooting between Win7 and Ubuntu is like switching between Firefox and IE on my old computer. If you can afford one now, just buy it. If you wait for the "sweet spot" between price/performance/capacity you'll probably be waiting for a while. They'll be a better value in the future, but that will always be a case and it doesn't mean they're not a good value now.
Can you resist a subpeona on your wallet?

This is somewhat a non-argument because subpeona's are easy to serve against you now. THe argument that they might be easier to serve on a company with no emotional attachment to you is countered by the fact that they have a much much bigger legal pocket and a desire to keep a "good" image to the public (by refusing banal subpoena's).

As to:

> and no black hat on the planet can break into my wallet without being in immediate physical proximity to me.

Maybe not. But any old pickpocket on the street can. Indeed there are more people that can steal your wallet than can break into Google's servers :)
We have single-processor 4GB AMD 1216 and 1354s running nginx. Neither one goes above 20% CPU while doing a few hundred req/s. If we were doing a lot more SSL the picture might change, but nginx seems very efficient.
Eh, the account was only registered to respond to this post. I'd presume John innocent until proven guilty.
It's also run by an HN'er - epi0Bauqu http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=epi0Bauqu
Maybe he should use this knowledge about what a poor product positioning move a tablet would be to assume that the announcement is actually not about a tablet at all!
Again, probably not the guy. This account was just made.
I just googled "bimodal"
The problem with the scatter plot is that you lose the average cost/average life expectancy info. On the original plot, the UK corresponds roughly to average health care costs and average LE. The slope shows if the country is getting value for money. The upward slope of New Zealand shows that they are spending less money per person than the average yet getting better than average results. The downward slope of Denmark shows that they spend more than the average for inferior results. That information is lost in the scatter plot.
There may have been 0 net job creation; but the way we communicate with one another - and work - was drastically disrupted for the better. In the 10's we will reconsider and rebuild it all.
I personally think predicting the next 10 years is a bit difficult. Because you generally can't predict broad sweeping changes in culture/society/technology and dealing in specifics is hard (who would have predicted the iPod and iPhone in 2000? considering their secrecy).

A year ago tablets were pretty much a dead end. If the decade had ended in 2008 no one would have predicted tablets making a comeback (probably, though the Crunchpad might have caused speculation). Now the Apple rumours mean it is high on our prediction lists, right?

I think if were going to do this we should go for Jan 1, 2050... (and my only prediction there that I will make off hand is that Man will have commercialised space travel properly and reached the Moon again - if not beginning to settle / talk about settling there.)
Top Benefits of Berry
I tried it with a 25 year old master lock and it didn't work.
Nicely done but it does seem to suffer from an excess of shopping / affiliate related links.
Ron Paul might have won reddit, but he sure as shit didn't win "the internet".
> Yet far more often we use it for trivia and the mundane

I play quizzo (pub quiz) occasionally. The winning team usually gets comps for their bar tab. I am shocked at how many teams will surreptitiously or sometimes brazenly pull out their mobile to google an answer. Where's the fun in that? It's not very often but I love when I can on a hunch/recall trivial knowledge like 'Iris' was the name of the woman in 'Taxi Driver'
Think of it as sharpening your tools.

BTW, the iTunes feed seems broken - it shows no episodes. The plain RSS shows .ogv and .flv, but no iPod friendly stuff.
Neat bug but hardly what I would consider "crazy". The source code was available for tracing (and that's how the root cause was made clear).

I don't consider a bug to be "crazy" unless the word "volatile" is involved :)
If this is the craziest bug you've ever seen, my guess is that you've spent your whole career programming in languages that lack raw pointers.
Oh sure, technically Microsoft isn't doing anything wrong. So we technically can't hold it against them. But the reality is they are holding back progress on HTML5, and it's no coincidence that that just happens to benefit them.

But, they may need to change their tune sooner than they'd like. Their marketshare is actually down to about 65%, and Firefox and Chrome gain new marketshare every day. HTML5 is very much in Google's interest, and they have the resources to influence things in that direction. I think the Chrome tv ads are just the beginning here.
Thanks for the link!, I'm from Argentina and here there's nothing similar to it as far as I'm concerned.
Data geeks: I need data on musical acts. Where to look?
I need data on the thousands of bands and musical acts: City, year formed, number of albums, etc.

I'm looking for the entire data set, not an API like last.fm.

Any suggestions?
20 minutes per week for reasonable mental health? Looks like I need to pick up my pace a little.. :-)
MC Escher come to life: Mouse eating plant pic
Yes, but the point is only theoretical since he has no first-hand experience with the device or the rumored services behind it.

I could see many legitimate uses for a good tablet-type device (and I'm not talking about the lame JooJoo Crunchpad).

At one time it seemed outlandish that there would be a PC in every home, or that people would have more than 1 TV and so on.

I'll wait until it ships (if ever) before casting a judgment.
You're right, sorting the items into individual drops is an important issue. I thought about hiring a service for taking care of this and for the transport.
Though I suspect you are trolling, I bite. Do you really think there would be terrorists in this world if everyone had enough food to eat, medical care, and lived in a free society?
I guess any bug that occurs below your accustomed abstraction level is "crazy". If most of your work happens in an interpreted high-level language, a quite mundane bug in the runtime (like this) is "crazy". Hardware bugs are "crazy" to most software people at any level, but to hardware folks they're just bugs.
Further evidence that we're in the future:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/3D_Vision_Main.html

With the right monitor, glasses, and video card, you can play Batman: Arkham Asylum in 3D.
"with near-instant access to astrology"

Not that your comment is incorrect, but I'm guessing you meant to say astronomy.
In the past 34 months (the extent of my Google web history data), I've performed 35401 searches with Google (about 34 per day).

Of course, it's easy to switch search engines. The reasons for me that Google has become "very important" or "a must" are the non-search services, like Gmail and Google Calendar. Sure, I could get my data using something like IMAP and go elsewhere, but that would be a huge pain.
Google and HTC Working On a Chrome OS Tablet
Agreed. I asked about that in October, they said:

"We still do not have any ETA on when that will be available. That being said I do not think we will have this ready anytime in the next couple of months."

I'm generally happy with EY Cloud, but it's still got some rough edges like this that should have been ironed out before they went out of beta.
Usually when I need or want some food item, I want it in relatively short order. If I'm out of Cheerios, I don't want to wait for 30 other people to also run out before I can replenish.

Groceries are one of those areas of commerce that run on extremely slim margins. I think that by the time you covered all the overhead of aggregating, managing, and distributing the bulk buys you'd end up with nothing left over. Plus, you are dealing with perishable goods for a good part of the product base. This makes proper handling and the dependence on functioning coolers even more critical.

Most business models these days are trending towards cutting out "middlemen" that don't provide a significant value-add. I don't think saving $50/mo. (taking a theoretical stab at an estimated savings) would be worth all the hassle to most people, there is too much potential for frustration.
"... You do not necessarily have to divide your exercise time into daily allotments, either. Existing “scientific evidence does not allow researchers to say, for example, whether the health benefits of 30 minutes on five days a week are any different from the health benefits of 50 minutes on three days a week,” according to the activity guidelines. Do what suits your schedule. ..."

Minimum for mental health, not physical health and doesn't take into account is the way people work very well. If you do lots of little bits of "regular" exercise it adds up. Leave a time interval and it "appears" to get harder to do the next time. I found this last year trying to see exactly why it's easy to fail doing hard things. By breaking the hard thing into little irregular steps and repeat them at fixed regular intervals there is less chance of failure.

The fail point is right around the time you start to do a hard task after an idle period. Take a break and things appear harder than they are. The amount of motivation energy is high. Do things regularly and the energy barrier seems lower. I found this out the hard way trying to see how far I could push myself without cracking or failing. My target last year was 1000 miles.
When I was in high school, I got the equivalent of a four-year degree in computer science from the internet because I was bored. It didn't feel like work.

The technology is not wasted.
Why in the world do they focus so much on the software? It's android 2.1, yes we know what 95% of it looks like. It is the hardware that is new, give us some impressions of that already.

God I hate the craptastic coverage that passes as reporting on Engadget and Gizmodo.
More about METs and tradeoffs between minutes exercised and intensity of exercise:

http://www.health.gov/paguidelines/guidelines/Appendix1.aspx
There is the part that says "religious people give more to secular causes than secular people do." Then the stat: 71% of religious give to secular causes while 61% of secular people do.
If there's no built-in interoperability, does it become my job to translate my maven dependency on foo:foo:jar:1.2.3 into a spec file dependency on foo-1.2pl3-4.noarch.rpm, and that my maven and rpm repositories each have a package which was built from the same code, and that all foo's dependencies match up in both places (recursively)? How do people actually use this stuff, short of just slopping jars around with rsync and abandoning all automatic management?
That's pretty clarified :) thanks (I wont reply, it will turn into an essay :D)

EDIT: though I will point out your definition of war is somewhat a false argument. Because your referring very specifically to it as a "state of being" - either we are at war or at peace. Which isn't always the case. In a very real sense governments are in conflict with "other parties" over the legality of drugs, their importation and production.

So in an absolutely literal sense there is a drugs war :)

The simile with Cancer is also incorrect as well as Cancer is a non-concious entity compared to, say, a band of drugs traffickers.

Though I do whole heartedly agree it is a much overused word.

[I suspect the original poster is referring, to give him the benefit of the doubt, to the actual "battles" with the drug cartels. That is something no amount of legalisation will stop, at least initially; so his is, it is true, a naive view]
I was referring to the follow up comments made on BarCampLA using the same gmail account as his original post there. Those comments have the same tone as the ones made here.
I use a lot of Google Chrome URL box search. I find it very convenient and now hate Firefox and Safari for using a different search box.

I still use Firefox for development though. But Chrome on almost everything else.
Pbzip2, how do I love thee?
I remember when people said that about Compuserve and AOL and GeoCities and a dozen other forgotten sites.
Hence "Fail early, fail often" and "try to fail as quickly as possible". Both of which I've seen repeatably from commenters here.
Remember that the FDA in the US only requires that a drug be better than placebo to be "effective" in many cases the drug company just has to show 0.1% better than placebo to get passed.
Excited about these! The ones from 08 were amazing, if you have just gotten into django, I would recommend going back and listening to some of them.

Favorites are anything by Malcolm, including Inside the ORM:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlhyp5Ve2qk

James' talk on Reusable apps:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-S0tqpPga4

Cal's Why I hate Django:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Fr65PFqfk

Technical Design Panel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tscMnoS4YU8
I agree with all these points.

I think that perhaps acting as an agent for a select clientele (restaurants, hotel chains, etc.) to get the best quality/quantity/price available at auction, you may be able to find some footing.

Also (could be totally incorrect, I don't focus on commodities), I don't know how much commodity futures and exchange traded commodities prices reflect on physically traded prices, but maybe this could be another avenue to pursue?
> A lot of the things that happened (break-in, heart attack, etc.) were black swans that probably can't be avoided in the future.

Neither a break-in or a heart attack is a black swan—people take out insurance against both all the time. If you're working with an organization, rather than an individual contractor, they most certainly have measures in place to ensure you never feel the brunt of such an event.
I guess any bug that occurs below your accustomed abstraction level is "crazy".

Good way of looking at it. So the ultimate crazy bug would be an error in the laws of physics? Actually, one better than that would be discovering an error in the laws of math.
The way the UK hits just at average (for cost and life expectancy) appears to almost make that look intentional.
My craziest bug was a program that would become flaky if you stood too close to the computer. Eventually I discovered that something wasn't grounded properly, and the program was being messed up by the electric fields of our bodies. (Later, the CPU exploded.)
Why? Giving to a church is generally considered a charitable cause.
When your co-founders have heart attacks and break-ins I would consider it abnormal. Sure you can insure your way out of it, but it's a constant tradeoff. A normal insurance (which we had) didn't help much since it only covered new equipment after the breakin, and didn't cover anything in the heart-attack case since we weren't working for a client with a contract. As a startup you have limited time and money and you've got to decide where to spend it. Large corporations have the luxury of being able to have all-covering insurance policies,redundancy, policies for replacing employees, well-established back-up plans, etc. Most startups don't.

The very things that make a startup cheap are also what make it vulnerable.
You are correct. But, If Americans are paying (av. 7k) per year on health and have a lower life expectancy that other industrialized nations, the data alone suggest Something is going very wrong. Strange that it has some of the highest paid doctors and most profitable health care companies also.
Surely there must be an explanation study somewhere?
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/how-much-do-doc...
http://gateway.nlm.nih.gov/MeetingAbstracts/ma?f=103622972.h...
They use it in Gerrit — http://code.google.com/p/gerrit/ — which is an open-source code review system built to mimic Google Mondrian, but which uses Git rather than Perforce. Shawn Pearce, the author of the linked email, is also the primary maintainer of Gerrit.

-sq
I consider segfaults in MPI programs to be crazy, if only because damn it we should not have to use C for this! I hope Fortress is ready for mainstream use soon, because writing parallel programs in C is inherently nuts.

(This is not to put down weird volatile bugs, of course.)
MusicBrainz might be what you're after:

http://musicbrainz.org/doc/About_MusicBrainz
If you failed Ethics 101 (sociopaths, raise your hand) or are not one to philosophize, you can safely quit reading here.

I love ethics, and my sense of ethics leads me to use the GPL. I'm a consequentialist/utilitarian, and that tells me that I should behave in a way that maximizes the utility of the software I release. I think that the GPL has a fine record of causing excellent-quality free software to come into being, so I use that; it's a strategic choice.

It's possible that someone could make an argument that releasing software under a BSD license, or indeed public domain, results in a greater volume of free software than when you use the GPL. I've never heard that argument made, though, and the success of Linux contrasted with the failure (as free software) of FreeBSD is one example of why I'd be suspicious of that claim.

Since we're talking about ethics, we could try to work out where yours diverge. It sounds like you might be a deontologist of some kind -- you say you're worried about people experiencing violence as a result of decisions people make to release GPL'd software, but that's extremely rare, because no-one forces anyone else to violate the license of GPL'd code; instead, people will just use other code instead.

If the outcome you're fixated on bothers you even if GPL software doesn't actually cause anyone to lose everything in a lawsuit (are there any documented examples of that happening?), you don't appear to be a consequentialist, or to choose your behavior based on expected consequences. What do you choose it on instead?
Or use http://scholar.google.com/
Are you volunteering to fix the bug if I can reproduce it? That would be very kind of you :-)
What not to worry about in the 2010s
I think your point is true when it comes to teaching introductory probability or perhaps even a second and third course in probability. However, at some point, it becomes necessary to dive into things formally.

This blog entry is meant for a review for a graduate level course, so it makes sense that it runs through a lot of formal definitions.
It's here alright. Until we can communicate telepathically - via our phones I bet - being able to send instant SMS messages around the globe will have to do.

When 3G (or 4G, or the next one) is more accessible to everyone we'll have a whole array of ways to communicate instantly with literally almost everybody on earth (for reasonable values of "almost"). Twitter, traditional IM, IRC, Skype, ...
I expect that 6. is spot-on. For me, 1. is almost here: all of my important data is in a git repository on a managed server in Texas, and backups are in Amazon zone east 1-b.

His predictions on AI also seem reasonable.
Jison: Bison in JavaScript
Or "second to last".
Hehe. I guess you didn't get the reference (http://wikiality.wikia.com/The_Craziest_Fucking_Thing_Ive_Ev...)
I watched all of the guy's videos, he's the hacker of woodwork. No doubts about it.

It's nice to see how other professions besides computer programming have masterful hackers.

The most intriguing video was this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTGO_NR6YiA where showed his computerized saw that he had built himself.
When programmers are real programmers or just know how to do it dudes
If you have photos on facebook but not backed up elsewhere (on your own storage devices) then you're setting yourself up for a fall.

A couple of things:

There are many photos of myself (and friends) that I enjoy and would love to have around, but weren't taken by myself. At parties, friends take pictures and upload them. I can enjoy them through Facebook, but I wouldn't think to download a backup 'just in case'. It's just too much of a hassle. With my own photos, I have a local copy by default, since the device I took the picture with has the original image.

Even if I had a local copy of all my pictures (including pictures by friends), Facebook's tagging feature is pretty neat, and I don't exactly have that functionality with a local copy. I use Picasa and I love the facial recognition features, but it took a lot of training, and a lot of personal intervention to get my library recognized. Facebook has the power of the masses working to tag me and all of my friends.

I think that Facebook will remain relevant as long as there is no suitable substitute for those features.
...but households have been shrinking in the same period, so the household income numbers aren't directly comparable over time.
> Later, the CPU exploded.)

That's not a bug. That's a feature.
If that's the craziest bug you've ever seen you've lived a sheltered life.

As long as you don't need to break out the logic analyzer or resort to sifting through a stack of 4" of fanfold assembly printouts you're doing just fine :)

Bugs like that are always grounded in the assumption that lower layers are reliable. Hint: they're not, they contain tons of bugs, the conditions to trigger them get more and more rare the longer a platform has been in production. That means that the 'hardest' bugs are going to be the last and if you find something in a platform that has been operational for a while you can bet your life it's not going to be easy to track down.

Interrupt triggered bugs are usually really hard to find as are subtle timing issues in high speed serial links. If it takes you less than a week to track it down it may be the hardest bug you've ever seen but in the greater scheme of things you're not in real trouble yet.
What meaning does "managed" have to you? I wasn't aware of a generic meaning. A virtual-machine-based language that happens to include garbage collection?
You didn't read the bit where it said you shouldn't be reading 0 locations from rom for an extended period ?

I've blown up a chip in a switch once by doing some benchmarking using this rig: http://clustercompute.com/ (it cracked in to two pieces right across the middle) but I've yet to see a cpu explode.

Eproms give a nice flash when you put them the wrong way around in their socket though :(
Right, but what's the benefit to the user?
This was a rather refreshing and realistic look at some of the many problems with Twitter.
Oh whatever.

People are continually obsessed with being "real"- being a "real" atheist or a "real" Christian, being a "real" submissive, or a "real" man, or a "real" whatever.

What it really comes down to is that some people think they are better whatever it is- Christian, programmer, or man- than other people. And in order to prove this, they make up some arbitrary definition of what it means to be a "real" this or that.

The only one who cares is you and your big fat ego.