skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps they do in some stores, but searching for a "vibrator" on their website yields 3 items - two with the Honda engine :) and one that's not what's normally meant by a vibrator, more of a novelty condom from Durex.
An ipad form factor without a screen running linux? That's actually not a bad idea for colo, an I bet it'd be cheap!
Training the Butterflies: Interview with Scott Berkun
Also Adobe's InDesign is £699.12 (as of 2010-02-24 in UK), $1080 USD.

I'm sure you could use Scribus (http://www.scribus.net/; http://www.scribus.net/?q=node/186).
Which is more difficult, working out and marrying a rich man, or software engineering?
I'm no apple fan, but how is Mac OS X (I'm assuming Server Edition) not up to the task of being a hosting platform? It's basically a LAMP stack minus the L. We're not talking about Facebook or Google levels of traffic here either.
This is why journalism is dying. I get a much more interesting and contextualized report from a comment on reddit (just stay away from the main page :) than I get from the article.
It'd be nice to hear a eulogy from an actual IE6 developer.
Time spend for talking(bitching) about IE6 dead > Time spend for IE6 fixing
Glad I'm not the only one who cringed at that.

Another thing to consider when using phrases like "O(logn)" is that the numbers grow exponentially with n (meaning their lengths grow linearly). Many CS students are trained to think of addition, multiplication etc. as "constant time" operations but that's not true for bignums!

BTW, I assume they meant difference equations.
Agreed. Further, as a law student in the US, it is quite common for people to keep up with the reading, and then study for a day or so for many of the exams. Granted there are harder exams (and harder teachers) that demand more, but it is fairly trivial in some classes to get an A without too much studying. I would however, be very surprised to find a student who had done no prep, studying for an hour and getting an A. In the law especially, there are some basic ideas, but in many cases, you must have an extremely nuanced understanding to correctly analyze some problems (see, for instance, problems relating to conflicts of laws) and even then might end up missing something. I think this guy is british or a citizen of some british colony, so they may do things differently, but all in all, I think we are not getting the whole story here.

That being said, I do like some of these techniques, and I imagine that if one were to become good at them, they could save time. Would the overhead be worth for most folks? I'm not sure, and I would say, likely not due to dropouts, giver-uppers, and those that already had decent self-developed ways to absorb material.
This analysis is a joke. Have you looked at the data on this page? It is inconclusive. The context is insufficient. What about overall traffic, weather, non-fatal accidents? other factors such as visiting travelers or data by county. Nowhere do I see data demonstrating any speed safety paradox. Comparing fatalities in only two years? and look at the green and red boxes between 1998 and 1999 for averages.

If you want to do a real study, start walking through some data covering a wider range of years, like the 2003 reports here (which covers fatalities by county going back decades):

http://www.doj.mt.gov/enforcement/highwaypatrol/annualreport...

Then you also have to consider improvements in auto safety over the years and how many of what kind of car and driver demographics were in the fatalities.

Edit: More traffic and fatality data:

http://doj.mt.gov/enforcement/highwaypatrol/forms/annualrepo...

http://doj.mt.gov/enforcement/highwaypatrol/forms/annualrepo...

http://doj.mt.gov/enforcement/highwaypatrol/forms/annualrepo...

http://doj.mt.gov/enforcement/highwaypatrol/forms/annualrepo...

http://doj.mt.gov/enforcement/highwaypatrol/forms/annualrepo...
I used to do a lot of Greyhound travelling in the late 90's. We were going through Montana one night in either '97 or '98, and the bus driver was certain he could make that bus do 100. I really was wishing for a speed limit then. Of course, 2hrs later, he fell asleep behind the wheel and we all had to yell at him to stop the speeding bus before we wrecked.
> Capitalism is a system to manage resources. Since it seems to end up with an extremely short term focus when it isn't tightly controlled

"seems"? Yes, we do have short-term focus in certain situations. However, I know 90 year-old farmers who plant orchards that won't be productive for 10 years.

And, you're assuming that "tightly controlled" produces benefits. Yes, there are often controls, but that's a long way from showing benefits from said controls. (Surely you're not going to argue that any system of tight controls produces benefits.)

And, as someone else pointed out, no one is stopping you from working on a long term basis. If you do it right, you'll get rich. If you do it wrong, probably not.

I'd like to see you get rich. However, I'm not willing to risk my money on your ideas because I've got my own.
I also hear that some of the laws are stricter. The Germans apparently heavily enforce things like passing on the correct side, and people going too slow for the lane that they are in (e.g. those people on US highways that immediately go into the far left lane and sit there going under the speed limit forcing everyone to pass them on the right rather than the left).
OK, but I feel like I'm not reading the same comments you (and the voters) are.

Why is allocating your own memory in Objective-C "better" than letting, say, GHC, do it for you? I may be a young whippersnapper standing on your lawn, but my programs run as fast or faster and are more reliable. And it takes less time to write them.
I think one of the biggest problems in our world is that all the governments are very obstinate when it comes to making international agreements. This issue could be well observed at the Copenhagen climate conference last year.

Therefore I suggest that we create a world government directly elected by all the people on earth. This government would be able to deal with all the unsolved global issues like climate change, world hunger or collapsing financial systems.

Well I have to admit, this isn't really my idea, I adopted it from Andreas Eschbach's book "Eine Billion Dollar" (German for "One Trillion Dollars") where a nobody inherits one trillion dollars and thinks a long time about what to do with it. It's a really good book, unfortunately only available in German, as far as I know...
My friend created a slick new alternative for the iPhone: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mr-moneybags-iou/id342122272?... (iTunes link)

Check out Mr. Moneybags! It's cool.
Gmail made me change my password due to suspicious activity
You forgot: c) lots of people would cry 'fowl' citing massive carnage on the highway as 90% of drivers immediately increase their speeds to 100+mph on downtown city streets (i.e. people over reacting citing nightmare scenarios that pull at emotions rather than logic in a bid to control what other people can/can't do)
Monad is not difficult
Haha, at least it wasn't a hick joke.
Cell phone data shows human travel incredibly predictable
Financial innovation debate
I'll vouch for it. Picked it up a few weeks ago and was sucked right in by these stories. Great mix of drama, comedy, and wisdom. Read a chapter or two over on Google Books: http://bit.ly/dAFbnw
That's pretty neat.

I'm wondering if there are places looking at hosting little boxes like:

http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=12678

Power-wise, they must be on-par with the Mac Mini/AppleTV but seem to be a fair bit cheaper.
Yeah, that was not worth it. I can invert a matrix in 2 lines of code, if the first is "import numpy".
EU Opens Antitrust Investigation Into Google.
This is an extension of my comment at < http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144481 > -- it was so well received that I decided to write up a proper article.

There's something about the word "monad" that just scares the hell out of people, but hopefully approaching monads from a more practical and less mathematical standpoint will make grasping them easier. They're really not that complicated.
Giving an industry subsidies and protecting it from competition is not dereguation. It's regulation.
Never going to happen. IE6 is infamous. I plan on telling my grandkids about it : ).
It is also unlikely to spread because the solution (no speed limits outside city limits) covers a lot of territory in a sparsely populated area like Montana and covers almost no roads in the dense urban centers in which the vast majority of the population lives and drives.

Additionally, it is not giving control back to "the people", it is giving it to the driver and that is not necessarily what "the people" would want in all situations.
How I Learned to Stop Hating Java and Start Loving s_client
Replying again since the parent is getting voted up, and I think it's misleading:

If you compare the Bay Area to the Dallas/Ft Worth area, you will get 58% white vs. 70% white. If you compare the specific city of SF to the city of Dallas, you'll get 45% white vs 50.0% white. In both cases, SF / Bay Area has a greater proportion of minorities than Dallas...

... not to say that jdminhbg doesn't have a point entirely (Dallas itself is more diverse than the stereotype) -- but it was hugely exaggerated by comparing a city to a region.
Single-handedly nonetheless.
If I understand this correctly, by passing a National Speed Limit back in the 70s, tens of thousands of people died due to increased accidents (or more)
Good point. Can you work out the asymptotics of the binary search algoritm, assuming multiplication is O(f(n))?
20/2? My WOW internet is 8/0.5...
I've spent some time looking at it... the problem is mostly organizational. getting atoms in rackmount form factors usually adds considerably to the price (and often sticks you with a shitty power supply that means your tiny atom eats 50watts, making it uneconomical) but without the rackmount form factor, sticking a reasonable number of those in a rack quickly becomes a nightmare of a ratsnest.

I'm not saying it's impossible, it just is going to take some work to build a proper rack, and even then, you are probably going to want to take the 'if it fails, cut power and leave it' approach which doesn't do as well with the 'send me your server, I host it' model.

or, maybe they are just really careful stacking it? I don't know. There is a whole lot of demand for cheap co-lo on dedicated boxes.
I've spent about 2 hours total bitching about IE6. I've spent entire nights trying to make things work in IE6.

IE6 typically takes 10 minutes - 6 hours to get things working in. Even just the act of having to make sure that things work in itself takes time.

@time_spent_bitching += 1.minute
Is IE8 backwards compatible with IE6? Doesn't that hold the browser back? If someone isn't writing for IE6, does than mean IE8 won't be fully utilized?
Simple/beautiful site to bring together online profiles
You know, I'm watching a show about a wedding cake contest in Oklahoma right now. If Food network can make money on that, there's got to be a way to do it online.

I think we're just getting started in our ways of monetizing audiences online. Just look at the reality TV shows that make money on the most obscure topics these days.
The title is slightly incorrect--there has never been a time in montana that there is no speed limit. The speed limit in the absence of a posted numerical limit was the "reasonable and proper" number.

It is certainly a complex area. I know that one of the issues was that out-of-state people were going there and acting as if there were no limit.

I think there are other measures of usefulness of such limits as these--one is wear and tear on the roads. The other is property damage. There is a famous case of icing in Chicago a number of years ago where the express lanes in the outbound Kennedy saw a massive pile-up. There were complaints about bad design of that part of the highway, even extending to some officials. The engineers responsible for the design pointed out that the road was designed for the posted speed limit. If you have ever driven on the Chicago expressways, the posted speed limit isn't even thought of as a challenge--it is totally ignored.

Thus, here is one incident of property damage as a result of speed limit violations.

So the issue is more involved than just the death toll. Injuries were not noted in the statistics either.

Disclaimer: I grew up in Montana, and still have family there.
I've never actually seen one in action but LinITX do a quad 1Ghz Via (sloow) rack which looks pretty interesting:

http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11485

Shame they don't take more ram.

Seem to be some other cheaper ones on http://linitx.com/viewcategory.php?catid=160&pp=160
I can't help but wonder who these "younger programmers" that don't know memory management are. To graduate from my school, you must know it very well. In fact, a CS major can't graduate without passing a class that requires you to write a malloc implementation yourself. A good amount of CS majors go on to take Operating Systems, whose core project (writing a kernel from scratch) requires that you interface with the virtual memory capabilities of the x86 processor (involving frame allocations, setting up the page table, etc.)

Maybe the ageism thing is more of a lack of understanding on both sides than a directed bias against only the older people?

I'm not trying to say that young people won't end up being better programmers in 10 to 20 years; if that weren't the case, there'd be no point in pursuing it as a career. However, to assume that comparative ignorance at 20 is the same thing as global ignorance is unfair.
I'd agree if she needed help for the task, but "difficult" doesn't mean impossible. Her response ("I hate you") is because he's made his point effectively: when forced to compare the value of watching TV against the effort of spending ten minutes moving the dresser, she was forced to admit how little benefit they get from the TV.

Also, I know humor shouldn't be analyzed, but I thought part of the humor in their dialog was that he took a principled stand about a pretty trivial act.
Mimeo and the Kleptopus King
That was alarming. We try to make the interview as low stress as possible, believe it or not. But unfortunately we end up having a lot of questions and only 10 minutes to ask them.
If you have infinite monies, Rackable has a 'cloudrack' that is quite similar: http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/cloudrack/cloudrackc2.ht...

problem is that this is a company that sells to large corporations, so the markup is, ah, out of my price range.
I'm a young whippersnapper standing on the lawn too, but there's something to be said about knowing the underlying workings of code before using it.

Here's the disconnect I'm seeing: Allocating your own memory in Objective-C is not necessarily better. But all other things equal, a programmer that understands how GHC manages memory is better than one that does not. You're arguing the utility of this knowledge, as it pertains to your usual use case, is minimal. This is not the same as saying that the utility of this knowledge is minimal.
Yup, tried them all (merb was the one i landed on for core dev work). So far Rails3 seems much better than all of them.

Community, documentation matter. Also having an active core team. Rails 3 seems like the best of breed web framework for now.
Ask HN: Is short-term value creation ever justifiable over long-term?
I'm trying to rationalize a self-regulated capitalist society where peoples decisions are only limited by their own morals. Why or when would individuals support the creation of short-term value or long-term value? Is supporting short-term value creation at the expense of long-term value immoral in a self-regulated capitalist society?
I think the comment you link to is actually kinda an odd illustration of your point[1]: the first reply (Poe's rule) clearly recognizes it as humor and suggests that others will take it overly-seriously.

The second reply is somewhere in the middle -- at least it didn't start out with "OMG you are a terrible person how could you say that!!!11" I don't know who jrockway is: maybe he's making a joke, and maybe not. It's more likely that he's making a joke, but you never can tell on teh intarwebs... even in a place like HN.

Regardless, I wouldn't consider pw0ncakes' comment puritanical or self-righteous in the least: in fact he/she slightly revels in the possibility of fat-cat execs getting their comeuppance.

[1] Though I don't disagree with your point; I have indeed seen the issue of which you speak, though I can't think of any specific examples.
College Offers Incoming Freshmen a Choice: iPad or MacBook
When you enter a username and password, they authenticate them with the bank, and receive a token. They store that token, not your credentials.

If I remember correctly, Mint is owned by Intuit, and subject to regular audits by the banks they've partnered with. Considering the relative quality of banking websites, I feel more secure checking my balance on Mint than via the official portal.
Cool! I hadn't known about QTMovieLayer. Thanks for the correction.
This is not a "paradox" in any way, it's merely a counter-intuitive result of research.
Tell HN: A small HTTP/REST dev utility I made. Hope you find it useful. Enjoy.
Perhaps the issue here is leading by example vs by authority.

Leading by authority alone doesn't scale. Even in places like the military where leaders have almost unlimited power, relying solely on authority is seen as poor leadership. Either you're ultra-charismatic or you just have to make sense to people.
Nice but all you're proving is that you know Ruby and you don't know Clojure. I'll gladly admit I don't know Ruby.

(defn fib [n a b lim] (if (< b lim) (recur (inc n) b (+ a b) lim) n))
(fib 1 0 1 (.pow (BigInteger/TEN) 999))

~0.0014 on my machine.

EDIT: I don't condone the article at all, it's link bait. And I think it's silly that people get up in arms about articles like this. Ruby is great. Haskell is great. Haskell and Clojure are really fast. End of story.
Quite a few of my friends are bi. Why can people on your site only be seeking men or women, but not both?
I don't think he means concurrently. At least, I really hope not.
Your points are valid concerns, however the article is about highway speed limits. We could remove highway limits while maintaining them inside neighborhoods.
I'm surprised that they are actually offering mac minis as a hosting service. Is there any reason to use one instead of a linux box running the same software on superior hardware for the same cost?
Agree, speaking as a guy who's pushing a web product live now. And still sitting here, at 7pm.
Things your lawyer won't tell you
But all other things equal, a programmer that understands how GHC manages memory is better than one that does not.

Sure, but I never said this. The original post, now many levels up, said "kids bitch about how hard it is to manage memory". It is hard. That's why people bitch about it, and don't want to do it.

I say that it's conceptually very simple. But in practice, it's very difficult to type the code to do this yourself at the right place. (It doesn't sound difficult, but most C programs either leak memory or use memory they didn't allocate, so clearly it is difficult.) There is a reason why C++ has things like the boost pointer library (and even auto_ptr). It's because memory management is for computers to do, not for humans to do.

I think people have trouble realizing that a human can know both "high-level" and "low-level" things, but that a programmer needs to stick to one level or the other -- don't write low-level concepts (memory allocators) in your high-level application program. The same person can write both parts, but the programmer writing the high-level app shouldn't be worried about the low-level details ("of course it works"). When you mix the levels of abstraction, you write bad code.

(I wrote a toy language once. I found that writing a garbage collector was much easier to get right than manually managing my own memory. When writing the collector, the details of memory allocation was all I needed to think about. When writing the high-level application code on top, all I had to think about was my high-level application. That's the whole point of abstraction, and it's what C-level languages fail to provide.)
I still live in Montana. While it's inaccurate to say that there was never a speed limit, my information indicates that even without injury tracking, the article's points are still valid. The injury rates during the "reasonable and prudent" period followed the death toll pretty closely - why would higher speed collisions result in more injuries and fewer deaths?

Disclaimer: I'm speaking from memory, not research.
I find the 10 minute limit quite odd. I assume you've thought it through, but it seems to me that the cost of spending a little more time interviewing would likely pay for itself many times over in better decision making. Especially after watching your Mixergy interview, where you emphasize how poor you consider yourselves at choosing who to invest in.
Brain System Behind General Intelligence Discovered
Do you think that this is because, up to the point of the YC interview, most founders haven't left the safety zone of "friendly feedback", and therefore haven't encountered a serious vetting of their business idea?
Very true. Driving the Autobahn from FRA to Bonn in my rental Mercedes A90 (small and weak) was a nerve-wracking introduction to Germany. In my experience, drivers on the right lanes will slam the brakes to let you in if there is a fast driver in the left lane (e.g., a Porsche).

There has also been a lot of talk about adding a speed limit to the Autobahn in order to prevent accidents. However, the very powerful automobile lobby doesn't let it get close to happening.
Comment for disagreement: the headline surely goes too far in describing what was discovered. This study will need a lot of replication

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

and further refinement. The press release didn't even identify the brands of IQ tests given to the patients, which seems to be a large omission. I'll keep an eye out for the PNAS paper about this.

After edit: anyone who can get through the paywall to PNAS early edition can see the article now. Citation is

Distributed neural system for general intelligence revealed by lesion mapping

1. J. Gläschera,b,1, 2. D. Rudraufc,d, 3. R. Colome, 4. L. K. Paula, 5. D. Tranelc, 6. H. Damasiof, and 7. R. Adolphsa,g

Edited by Edward E. Smith, Columbia University, New York, NY, and approved January 25, 2010 (received for review September 10, 2009)

Published online before print February 22, 2010, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0910397107

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/02/05/0910397107.full...
Honestly, I don't think your explanation is any easier to grasp than "All about monads". I think RWH and the Typeclassopedia are easier for the uninitiated to understand. ("You could have invented monads" is also very good. Although I think it's sad that I know the exact titles of blog posts about monads...)

What I like about RWH is that it builds up monads as "why you need this". You see code in its non-monadic form for a while, and then monads are introduced, and suddenly you see the same program being significantly smaller. You understand the before and after, and can begin to reason for yourself what a monad is. And it becomes abundantly clear why they are useful in Haskell -- you just saw your program shrink by 2/3s.

And a nitpick unrelated to your article -- I notice a lot of Haskell articles implement things unnaturally just to use a certain feature. This makes it hard to understand why you would actually want to use that feature. The reader skims the article, says "this is just a fold", and dismisses monads forever. (I remember reading LYAH's section on applicative functors once. All the examples do nothing, they are merely functions that technically type-check. Not a good way to learn; the real paper on applicative functors is much more approachable. But I digress.)