skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have an apology to make. I submitted this about a month or two ago, and of course sent it to the people in my company to see the feedback.

Unfortunately, I was still in the process of training them for how to interact with the community at the time and three of them thought it best to come in with shill comments and not identifying themselves as with the company- thinking that this was about promoting the company, not feedback. This was highly embarrassing to me, because I made the poor assumption that everyone understood the proper etiquette on social networking sites. But that wasn't the case.

The thread was (rightfully) locked and removed from the listings, just as I would have done as a community manager if someone was shilling on my site. I'd like to try again and not repeat the same mistakes.

I deeply am sorry for this transgression and they will not be posting here again in such a way.
The former was Boston, the latter is NYC. NYC's 7-day card is $27
Why not on Posterous or Flickr? Not everyone wants every post or photo to persist.

Or, more practically: if this were convention or law, why would Posterous or Flickr be exempt?

BTW I like this idea.
As soon as you open the door, whoosh
That is still not a reason not to use git on your personal machine. These use cases are exactly what git-svn was made for.

If you are comfortable with SVN then by all means use it but if you haven't at least tried Git you are missing out on some really powerful tools and workflow possibilities.

If you have a lot of binary files then maybe subversion might be a better fit for you. But even then the local directory size can be smaller with Git.
EADS Astrium develops space power concept
When I was travelling in Europe, I glanced at a small compass while exiting the subway so I could head in the right direction and look like I knew where I was going, even though I'd never been a certain place before.
As the other replies to you go plus:

... "Freedom Of Speech" merely means the government will not put judicial sanctions on the exercise of speech. As owner or employer, the government can limit speech as much any private individual can limit speech. Federal civil service employees are restricted in their political speech as a condition of their employment. This is utterly and absolutely constitutional.

Expelling a student from a public university for not obeying a code of conduct isn't putting any unconstitutional restriction on freedom of speech since it isn't a judicial sanction. Again, the government puts all sorts of non-judicial limits on speech.

I agree that about the public accommodation part but that's a different issue - that's the issue of whether non-students will allowed to speak in semi-public places like Sproul Plaza. I think they should but I realize there's no constitutional basis for this.

Your unlimited freedom position seems to be asking whether a student should be able to shout "honky" or "niger" out their dorm window without being expelled from the university. I think they shouldn't be able to, they should be expelled. I think the university should have the authority to remove those who create an unpleasant environment and I think it should use it in a limited, appropriate way.

Of course universities should have codes of conduct, some part of those codes are going demand minimally respectful behavior. I boggles my mind that so many people want to grand-stand "freedom of speech" and "the constitution" only and specifically with regard to the "anti-PC" hobby-house.
The China response, which is part of this article in The Standard, is a rewrite of what was published by the China Daily here: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-01/22/content_936488...

The China Daily does not tell you too much more, but at least its closer to and identifies the source of China's response.
And here he's calling Obama a sellout or close to it:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/12/did-obama-sellout-to-wa...
Sure. We started doing this last summer, and this is the first paper accepted for publication that uses the method.

http://autonomy.cs.sfu.ca/doc/wawerla_icra10.pdf

and here's a draft of our paper on the methodology, with rationale.

Long paper: http://autonomy.cs.sfu.ca/doc/wawerla_submitted_2009.pdf

Original short workshop paper:

http://autonomy.cs.sfu.ca/doc/wawerla_rss09_workshop.pdf

For context, here's the lab's publication list:

http://autonomy.cs.sfu.ca/publications.html

We plan to continue this, even if the idea doesn't catch on.
This is where git can be more subversive than svn ever was. You need one (influential) developer to start using git-svn, and wait for it to spread.
Partial checkouts.
I used to work in the semiconductor industry, where HDL Netlists can go upto several GB.
If you are in the EDA industry and you need to test your tool on a Netlist or two, you dont want to be checking out the entire test-tree.

I suppose partial checkouts are critical for several other fields - for e.g. take a look at a similar request for Mercurial (http://mercurial.selenic.com/bts/issue105)
Message 8102:

Two of the features that made it difficult to 'sell' Hg for the main SCM
of FreeBSD were the lack of partial checkouts and partial history

And because of the way legacy code is structured, this gives rise to issues like this one - http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MRELEASE-457

For several use cases, this is a highly critical feature and the reason that SVN may win over finally - perhaps as SVK (svn's distributed revision control fork)

<empirical-observation>
The transition from cvs to svn happened very quickly, to the extent that it is now the predominant SCM. The migration tools are robust today, but they were not so a couple of years back - which is why it is even more suprising that people were willing to undergo the cvs2svn pain but are not willing to do the relatively painless 'git svn clone'. Maybe git truly doesnt suffice in a LOT of situations.
</empirical-observation>
I'm not color blind, and those two colors on the Jeopardy map are nearly indistinguishable -- the same hue, differing only slightly in value and saturation. It is a terrible choice of colors.
> The MBTA's a case study in incompetence, due to years of turf battles between the lege and governor's office. It's run by a bunch of overlapping boards with an org chart that looks like a spider web.

Why is it that the MBTA, BART, the Phoenix light rail, etc. always have these problems (unrealistic projections, turf battles, overlapping spheres of control, etc.), and yet Greyhound, Southwest Airlines, etc., don't?

I'd suggest that this sort of problem is endemic to government run transit organizations, and doesn't crop up in the private sector because there's competition, and private firms can only get as many dollars of budget as the paying public is willing to give them.

Horrific incompetence results in extinction ... in the private sector.
Twitter users credentials are vulnerable to Adobe Flash programming
So you'll see on Marketwatch, Y! Finance, Motley Fool and others about how the president's comments caused the market to drop. This is rubbish.

No, this is rubbish. When the government seeks to regulate huge profit-makers at banks, it's completely rational for those banks' values to fall. This is the consensus view of bullish and bearish commentators alike, and I have no idea why anyone would disagree. The blogger points out that commodities fell harder. That and a nickel and a time machine will get you a cup of coffee.

Short term noise in the market happens.

A five percent haircut is not "noise". http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...

And those pundits who thought there was some correlation between politics and markets disappeared.

No they didn't, and the rally has been extremely political. I hate linking this over and over, but it needs to be understood. There is a near-perfect inverse correlation between the value of the dollar and the market:

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...

You can creepily see this happening on a tick-by-tick basis. I don't know why this is so perfect, but I suspect it almost has to be algos doing it. This is the kind of thing that the government (may) start regulating.

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&... [<-- jan 22 2010]

This is not historical:

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...
That's what's so great about it. I don't want the author(s) of an article to reinforce a particular personality, as seen in so many other papers/magazines where the writers are trying to build a public brand around themselves. I find no difficulty in separating the reportage from the editorial viewpoint. That element is always present anyway, and I'd rather have it clearly articulated.
Does anyone seriously think that a determined information-seeker in China can't find out whatever information he/she wants? Google's old approach of showing which results are censored was highly empowering for such truth seekers because it showed exactly what their government didn't want them to read.

It's important to take the recent anti-China news in proper context:

1) China has long been a huge buyer of US treasury bills, in order to keep its currency low relative to the dollar. This helps make China's export industry more competitive but harms the Chinese in general. Some Americans dislike this because they think this makes the US vulnerable to China. Other simply dislike competing against extra cheap Chinese manufactured products. This unites two strange bedfellows against China.

2) Obama moved to start a trade war with China by imposing a tariff on tires... this was simply a political handout to the US tire industry... an industry he must have owed something to.

3) Google's move to pull out of China, aside from harming average Chinese people, was a silly, knee-jerk response, and Google will probably be punished by shareholders if it proceeds.

4) Hillary's recent remarks were intended simply to rile up the Chinese government. Does anyone really think that the way to persuade someone else to your line of thinking is to publicly insult them? Hillary knows this, but ramping up some petty friction with China serves her political ambitions.

For those who are wondering, China is a very difficult country to keep stable. After economic reforms, coastal cities have become rich very quickly, leaving inland areas extremely poor, etc. Most of what China does that Americans find offensive is intended to preserve social stability. In that sense it's highly conservative. One can imagine a small public library in the US refusing to install a computer long after the internet age began... out of some slightly misguided notion that it will help stave off social changes the librarian considers unsavory.

In China's case, the danger is widespread, violent riots, etc. Do you think that would be a good thing? What should China's government do if that occurs, acquiesce? So far China's government has done a decent job of instituting more free market policies, at the expense of social freedoms. They've essentially modeled their approach a bit more after Singapore than after the US.

It's hubris to claim that every country should choose exactly the same mix of social and economic freedoms as the US. This situation should remind all of us of when George W. Bush took great pains to convince the world what a bad guy Saddam was, so that he could start a war.
Weather simulations have even more data; they are less accurate for other reasons.

Also, running someone else’s exact simulation again is useless. You need to start from scratch (or some vary well accepted baseline libraries) for it to be useful.
Reduce the fares to nothing. Utility of a system rises dramatically as the frequency of bus/train arrivals drops below about eight minutes so people can just show up without checking the schedule.

Tax money goes to build roads and other car related infrastructure. Car travel is obviously subsidized since you generally do not pay to drive on a given road at the time you drive.

It would not be unreasonable to subsidize buses or other public transportation in a similar way.

Obviously, free internet should be provided on all buses and trains, as well as increased bicycle carrying capacity.

Also, if the ticket price was reduced to zero for buses, ridership would increase and costs per rider would be reduced. Greater bus ridership would reduce the money municipalities would need to spend for road expansion.
Simo Häyhä - The White Death
Amazing that people are still finding this, considering it was written five years, on a couch, in about 20 minutes. And yes, it was the best $369 I've ever spent.
You know, I try to give unions the benefit of the doubt. I think they still serve a function and I am not ideologically opposed to them. But then we come across incidents like this:

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/ttc/article/754297--is-he-sl...

Toronto's transit system is amongst a select few in North America where middle- and upper-middle class folks make up a significant chunk of the ridership. Other cities dream of trying to convince folks to give up their daily commute by car. We've achieved this for a good number of people. It also happens to receives the least government funding in all of North America. But the union is really holding our system back.

For crying out loud, it is 2010 and we still have manned booths whose sole purpose is to convert one kind of coin into another. We also have -- I kid you not -- workers that wait on the side of the road with crow bars to switch streetcar track paths during rush hour. Also, I'm embarrassed for anyone visiting our city to ever think of going to the washroom at a subway station. They're absolutely vile.
Do you know how the total amount of subsidies to mass transit compares to the subsidies to drivers by supplying a completely tax-funded street network?
Don't forget to wait. Poison ivy might not show up till the next day.
That just makes my point. Follow me here...

The original comment was saying "this guy is partisan and that's why he doesn't like the article".

You tried to refute that by saying "He dislikes both sides"

I'm saying he doesn't really dislike both sides. He dislikes one side and agrees with but is disappointed in the other. Those are vastly different things.
Read this yesterday, some great points in the article. Enjoyed how he focuses on finding niche markets and directly targeting them versus trying to create this massive SEO/Social media BS marketing escapade.

The two email breakdowns to him are also great examples. Some good takeaways from the article as a whole
Looks horrendous. Who wants to work inside a tiny box?
I'm not sure your personal business being logged can be compared to the social change of the Industrial Revolution.

Cast your mind a few hundred years ago, where people were born, grew up and died within a few miles of their village. Everybody knew your business back then; your character, whether you were hard working or a drunk, whether you were honest or a crook, whether you were late for church, or couldn't afford new shoes, or whether you were barren. We've been here before.

The question is whether now that we are in roughly the same place, are we going to go back to the oppressive small mindedness of the village, or can we master this without all becoming judgmental busybodies.
Yeah birds and other animals (even some people) can eat poison ivy. Most of us would die.
The reason I canceled my WSJ subscription had nothing to do with ideology. I used to read the WSJ for the in-depth stories about topics that aren't necessarily in the headlines right now or that are otherwise not especially mainstream. After the Murdoch acquisition, the WSJ has increasingly focused on shorter stories about more populist topics. I can get that anywhere, so I no longer have a reason to read the WSJ rather than any other paper out there. I'm sure many others feel the same way.
...it is naive for individuals to assume that someone else would protect/fight for their rights.

When you say "someone else" in this sentence, you have to mean someone different.

I disagree. I believe someone with a different skin color or a different culture would fight for me and protect my rights. It's a matter of the individuals and their values, not their cultural origins.
There's no way it would be more cost-efficient for people to take even a $0.50 / mile cab trip in their daily transportation than it would a $15/week bus & subway pass.

The congestion would be unbelievable, both on the highway and particularly at well-used pickup and drop-off points.

See: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3402/3342003343_0fa801cec5.jp...
Selling more ads would probably increase revenue for the metro systems. Making them bigger and selling them for more would help as well. Google doesn't apply here because they can't use this technique for fear of backlash.

I can't imagine anyone complaining about more/bigger ads on buses, especially if it helps reduce subsidies and spending.
From a design perspective, I would suggest the use of softer colors. The current blues and greens used look like (cheap) neon lights.
It's a quicker fix than you'd think in the central areas of most American cities. In Austin, the neighborhood next to the University of Texas (enrollment: ~50,000) was drastically underzoned for decades. Within five years of its rezoning, the neighborhood changed drastically. I'd estimate that the neighborhood has about doubled in density in half a decade, and there's still plenty of land that will be redeveloped in the next decade.

Most suburbs will never be easy to serve with high quality transit, but most central cities could do it fairly quickly with the stroke of a pen.

http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/column?oid=oid...
Whereas HDFS is to be used programatically or through a shell, it appears (though the documentation is sparse) that Ceph was designed to be mountable like most traditional unix FSs. There's the MountableHDFS [1] project for Hadoop, and so these could end up being equivalent interface-wise. At that point it's all up to how they implement create/append/delete/seek/replication semantics, which Hadoop has way more documentation on than Ceph.

The Ceph docs also imply that they have designed it so that it's easy to snapshot directories---I'm not sure whether HDFS has facilities for this.

[1] http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/MountableHDFS
That fits my experience. In the 1980s as a teenager I programmed in BASIC. I read a magazine article about generating mazes. I couldn't wrap my head around the algorithm. Later I learned Forth. After that, the algorithm made sense, because I finally had a language in my head suitable for recursion.
Please do not go out and pick sword fights.
Scaling for High-Performance on Google App Engine
Right, because it's including construction and infrastructure costs (the things being subsidized!) in the "net cost" of the ride. The actual operating expenses are almost precisely borne by the fare structure, and in fact many cities have laws to this effect prohibiting them from funding things like salaries for transit companies.
I am skeptical of using products when it's not clear how they make money.

If you give everything away for free, when will it stop being free? When will the bait and switch occur?

If everything truly is free, how long will you be around?
The PageRank method would basically mean that I don't get to vote on submissions. I detest twitter, and I don't have my own blog -- neither of which prevents me from upvoting stories based on the HN guidelines (at the moment).

I just don't see how the linking power of the submitter should have anything to do with their voting power on this site. With your algorithm, the webmaster of a popular celebrity gossip site would have vastly more voting power than I would. Is that what you want?
The Chess Master and the Computer (by Garry Kasparov)
New York to Miami, on the same Coast, is a 31 hour trip by rail! But only 20 hours by car and 3 hours by plane. Which would you take?

The train. Flying is too much hassle, and the highway uses up my attention which I would rather delegate to a professional driver while I do other things.
And yet the MBTA employees are being, y'know, paid. It's in debt because of infrastructure investment. And the proposal in the linked article is to subsidize that investment. I don't see how your point does anything but support the linked article.
What can you say on how Toronto's succeeded in getting more people to give up on commuting by car?
The photo you chose for the home page gives the impression that this site is for something other than what it is. I figured this was a music service of some sort and then I realized it was for communications after reading more.
In this case I really hate to say I told you so, but I cancelled my subscription the day the Murdoch deal was done precisely for this reason.

I was a daily reader since 1977. It was an awesome paper for investors and business folks with a clear line between the editorial content and the remainder. Even the editorial page always published opposing views.

It was interesting that when I cancelled, the lady I spoke with me told me that under the new ownership it was going to be free, which was irrelevant to me. She mentioned that many said the exact same thing, $100/yr. was peanuts for such a high quality tool of the trade.

I recommend Bloomberg online for reasonable quality and good numbers.
In Medellin, Colombia. The subway is connected to two systems of Sky carts (similar to ones used on ski resorts). That allows the "subway system" to reach hard terrain (mountains) and expensive terrain (need only to set large polls and stations).

For residential areas with high land prices, this might seem as an excellent and cheap to implement public transport. (These are the same areas where cars are usually sitting in traffic jams).

Does anyone have information if this model is working out for them ? Is it used somewhere else successfully ?
I would be interested if you can present a specific piece of code that would be really confusing to a programmer who does not have experience using languages with lexical closures. I didn't follow the same order of education, so I never really experienced an a-ha moment like that; they seem like a simple language construct to me (although I can definitely understand how it would be hard to recognize their utility without having experience using them.)

(I can understand how code passing around anonymous functions can be confusing to people who don't use a language with first-class functions, but I would figure they're confused by the logic, not by the closures.)
Yup, but at least they're blatant and out in the open about their editorial slant (pro-globalization). They don't pretend to be "impartial".
I'd change "Unlimited FREE Voice" to "Unlimited FREE Voice Chat". I wasn't sure what the site did right away.

I'd also add a link to the pricing page. I was on the Features page and wanted to know what the pro plan offered by I didn't want to click on the Download link because it said download and had a price on it. I did click it though and it took me to the download page, which is also the pricing page. Maybe separate the two or label it some sort of hybrid?

I do like the design overall. The testimonials on the download page are good for me, because I'm a nerd. If that's your target demographic then awesome, but if not then I'd try to find some testimonials that will appeal to the layman.
They have a pro version, which costs money.

http://imvox.com/download.php
There's one key difference between Node.js and Twisted / EventMachine / other non-blocking IO frameworks for existing languages: Node.js doesn't have any blocking function calls. You have to try really, really hard to block your event loop in Node.js. Every single library released for Node.js works asynchronously, and is hence safe to use.

Not having to even worry about whether or not a library I want to use is blocking is a really useful feature.
Comparative Histograms of World Economic Powers