skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yelp does not need to extort people to be insanely successful. It would be a pretty bad move, given that if they did actually do this, someone could:

a) Simply print out the email where Yelp explicitly extorted them.

b) Record the phone call using Google Voice or whatever, where Yelp explicitly extorted them via the phone.

c) Save the hardcopy of the letter or fax where Yelp mailed them the extortion offer.

Those are the only ways Yelp communicates. It would be trivial for one of the millions of companies in Yelp's directory to blow the whistle with concrete evidence. Yelp, an extraordinarily valuable company, would be pretty much ruined overnight. Why would they run this risk to squeeze out a few extra bucks?
I wish the energy being put into the whole 'nosql' movement had moved toward object databases instead of KV stores. KV is fine for caching, but is obviously not suitable for modeling and retrieving data with complex relationships.

I think it's hilarious that some NoSQL solutions now have 'columns!', way to go, you're slowly reinventing the RDBMS, poorly...
"Global cooling"/"Global dimming" (small particulates suspended in the upper atmosphere) and an increase in pollution etc. has messed with them [tree rings].

Actually, we don't know what factor messed up tree rings. If we knew that tree rings were f(warmth, x), we would simply keep tree ring data for the entire calibration period and include x in the calculations. The fact is, factor x might apply in the past. We simply don't know.

I'm curious though; if you are skeptical of our knowledge of past temperatures, how can you not be skeptical of predictions of future temperatures? All the climate models are calibrated to past temperature records, so how can the models give good results if the past records are bad?

A hypothetical: I come to you with a proposed algorithmic trading strategy which I've validated it against historical data. But oops I'm not that great at keeping records, and I actually threw away the market data. I also emailed my employees and told them to delete the data if the SEC ever came asking for it. And I also ignored some historical periods where the numbers didn't work. But I kept some stock charts showing exponential growth!

So, you want to invest in my fund?
Flagged as flamebait. Doctorow seems not to be able to understand the difference between "armed forces" and the police.
Maurizio Pollini's recording of the Etudes & Preludes.

Henryk Szeryng's recording of Bach's Sonatas & Partitas for Solo Violin
> This is a bill that proposes to give US venture capitalists the overt ability to terminate the residency status of founders and their families.

False.

"To make visas available, we would amend immigration law to create a new EB-6 category for immigrant entrepreneurs. We would draw from existing visas under the EB-5 category. The EB-5 permits foreign nationals who invest at $1 million in the U.S., and thereby creates 10 jobs, to obtain a green card. In areas where unemployment is high, foreign nationals only need to invest $500,000 to obtain residency. Though roughly 10,000 visas are annually allocated for the EB-5 category, less than half were used in FY 2009, so the addition of immigrant entrepreneurs should not present an unreasonable burden."

Green card is permanent residency - once they've got it, they've got it. This looks pretty awesome.

http://startupvisa.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/dc-startup-vi...

It was a pdf and I coudln't figure out how to highlight so I retyped it myself - apologies if there's a minor grammar/spelling error.
And now look at http://cryptome.org/
> There's currently no better introduction than reading the major LW posts/essays.

At the present time, that's correct. Eliezer is working on at least one book (maybe more.. I'm not sure anymore) that should stand on its own better.
They say that 1 KW will power the average US home, hu? Yeah, so long as all heating is natural gas and no one ever turns on a hair dryer. Maybe they were talking about averaged load? But then they seem to have left out the 4 tonnes of lead-acid batteries you'll need.
Ask HN: Should I choose a managed or unmanaged VPS?
Background: I'm about to complete an upgrade to an existing web application and need to decide between a managed vs. unmanaged VPS. I'm bootstrapping the project at the moment and although I'm comfortable managing my Ubuntu Karmic laptop, I am concerned about having administer a production server. I've read the tutorials on Slicehost and Linode and implemented a local test server, but feel that there is likely much more to managing a real server.

I am very interested in the Xen VPS servers, as they seem to offer better price/performance than traditional Virtuozzo CPanel-based VPS servers, but feel that the added work/time required is not worth the tradeoff.

Question: For those who have already made this decision and were not already experienced sys admins, do you feel that the initial time spent learning and the ongoing time spent managing your server is worth it? I am leaning towards the managed server option, since having managing development, sales and customer service is already time consuming.

Site specs: PHP5 (Kohana v2.3.4 framework); ~90% dynamic db-driven (MySQL); APC caching; ~10-15K unique visitors per month.
So many submissions about Bloom: http://searchyc.com/submissions/bloom?sort=by_date

Here's the earlier submission of which yours is a duplicate:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144035
Yes. If you start a company that employs 5 Americans and generates $900,000 in revenue, any VC you negotiate with gets to factor "deportation" into their terms.
This new visa sounds good in theory, but the requirement is too steep... 1 million in either VC or revenue?

I'm looking into emigrating, but I guess the US still has too-steep requirements for it to be a country to immigrate to.
"The Database" if such a thing existed, should have a field for "probable state". This field could be filled in by the police detective in charge of the case.

Most "kidnappings" are just parents stealing their kid from the parent that got custody. While a formal accusation of that parent, sans evidence, is and should be, illegal, if the mom says, "I think my ex is working on a fishing boat in Alaska", putting AK in the probable field is a good bet.

Services like this could then geo-ip serve content based on state abducted, and state probable.
site crashed...
Well, there's a reason why the founder crew working here at Timetric are all ex-theoretical chemists...

...ish, anyway. I'm a mineralogist by training, which exposes you to a different set of scary stuff. X-rays, neutron beams, bandsaws, and in my own oh-God-close-escape moment, cryogenic gases - a mishap during a calorimetry experiment leading to a canister of liquid N2 gushing out through a broken pressure hose.

All kids' play compared to this stuff, though; neutrons will kill you dead but there are so many safety interconnects and film-badge radiation detectors that you'd have to actually want to get hurt. Organic chemists are hardcore.
So, in your estimation, would that be "better" or "worse" than "you cannot get a visa to come to the US and start a company at all, ever" (the status quo)
For those of you comparing git and hg, I would suggest that they are actually quite similar. Check out this article "Mercurial for Git Users" here:

http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/GitConcepts

It answered many of my questions on the nuances of Mercurial. The branch model, bare repositories, and command equivalence table were especially helpful for someone like myself who has used both systems but never fully understood the distinctions.
Here's the text of the proposed bill:

‘‘(3) SPONSORED ENTREPRENEURS.—The Sec-
retary of Homeland Security shall terminate the per- manent resident status of a sponsored entrepreneur and the alien spouse and children of such entre- preneur if the Secretary determines, not later than 3 years after the date on which such permanent resi- dent status was conferred, that—

‘‘(A) the qualified venture capitalist or qualified super angel investor who sponsored the entrepreneur failed to meet the investment requirements under section 203(b)(6)(A)(i); or

‘‘(B) the entrepreneur failed to meet the job creation, capital investment, or revenue gen- eration requirements under section 203(b)(6)(A)(ii).’’;

The job creation, capital investment, and revenue generation requirements (by the way, this language is ambiguous, with the "or" being more restrictive here and less restrictive earlier in the bill) are:

‘‘(I) create not fewer than 5 new full-time jobs in the United States employing people other than the im- migrant’s spouse, sons, or daughters;

‘‘(II) raise not less than $1,000,000 in capital investment in furtherance of a commercial entity based in the United States; or

‘‘(III) generate not less than $1,000,000 in revenue.

You know more about immigration law than I do. All I can do is read. Tell me what I'm misinterpreting.
Ah, didn't catch the date. I understand your anger may have subsided by now :)

But to me this still seems like letting GoDaddy off the hook. I understand they want to provide some sort of malware protection service for which they need to periodically log in to your vps with your password. The question is, if you are concerned about security at all, and you're not interested in taking advantage of that service, why would you continue to do business with a company that openly stores your password and makes it retrievable?

Seems like you shouldn't care if they have some sort of "procedure" in place for password retrieval. That's almost irrelevant. It's time to move your business elsewhere.
Automatic malware removal on Linux systems? Get real.
"Where there's smoke, there's fire"

That's the mantra of conspiracy theorists, UFO forums, and Bigfoot communities. Let's give Yelp the benefit of the doubt before we assume that they are illegally extorting small businesses based on no public evidence.
Sorry -- in between the "dey took our jawbs" crowd and the blatant nativist crowd, any common sense approach to visas in the US is fighting an uphill battle.

But we're trying.
"most of the wars have ended, the age of coups is over"

Really? There may be fewer wars, but there are still a lot (look at the list of ongoing conflicts on Wikipedia). There was a coup in Niger a week or two ago. Things may be getting better, but they are not good.
We overpay for slow, old Internet: Canadian Study
Computer Networking, A systems approach.

A great book. Highly recommended.

http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Networks-Third-Approach-Netwo...

Of course, one of the classics is this one:

Internetworking with TCP/IP vol. 1.

http://www.amazon.com/Internetworking-TCP-Vol-1-Principles-A...

Edit:
If you are considering Linux, then the implementation is discussed here. I would not suggest this, unless you are actually hacking. In that case, this is okay:

http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Network-Internals-Christ...
> Why would they run this risk to squeeze out a few extra bucks?

You must not hang out with enough sales people. Companies do irrational things for short term gains all the time. See Wall Street for a recent example.
First of all, it's better than someone pushing SVN.

Second, it's like Python vs Ruby (Hg vs Git). Doesn't matter.

Third, any attempt to fix the current issues of programming is better than "just hire a super-human-developer and leave him alone". Spolsky pushed bug tracking systems couple years ago, now he's advertising code review and better code commit/build workflow.
If the filesystem is shared (i.e. server has / , and your vm1 is under /data/vm1 for example), they can access any files or databases without even logging in. If the filesystem is on a SAN they can access it read-only of course without you even knowing.
Worse. I think it will be somewhat unfair to visa aspirants and that it will distort the market.
I'm a big believer that passion can translate into making money on the Internet. Passionately working on something is inherently valuable - that is, it's at least valuable to the designer and others possibly as well. The trick is merging passion with something either highly valuable, or having value to many people. For example, being passionate about how bacteria forms on pennies may not yield much future by itself, but tweaking that passion to possibly an area of study for solutions to handling germ ridden objects like money could be quite profitable. You already have one of the best things I can suggest: a blog. This enables your potential value to be found. (one note: try having at least one picture for every entry) Next, think of how you might fit your passion in with existing lucrative areas. Last, continue to network/reach out to others, including those that might back your passion financially. It may take months, or years to cash in, but chances are you'd work on your passion anyway, and I believe that's a great precursor to success.
Yelp could do a itself a huge favor by becoming more transparent about its so-called "Review Filter." All it needs is a "show all" link somewhere on the page showing the supposedly suspicious reviews that were deleted by the filter, along with a list of reviews (maybe just the author name and/or first sentence) that were deleted by the author or by Yelp staff due to a TOS violation.

Yelp claims editorial is completely uninfluenced by the sales team, businesses claim otherwise. Put the data out there and let people decide for themselves.
I guess Boston has startups but I didn't think Indiana had a lot. This is going to help Silicon Valley more than Boston or Indy--where are Feinstein and Boxer?
Do you think it will be less fair than "You can't even have an application form"?
I'm no better than this in most HN arguments but will hypocritically observe that you opt out of reasonable debate about immigration policy when you imply that your opponents are South Park caricatures.
"We have no control"
Godaddy is one of the worst choice for hosting. Also, avoid media temple. So, basically most well known hosts, other than these two, are good choices.
I wonder if the editor choose to select Mac apps or there aren't really Windows apps? Come on but %80 uses windows!
Then, there's a third category of questions where these two approaches fail. In fact, when asked a question of this type, one does not immediately know how to go about proceeding to investigate it, e.g. "What is truth, Is there a God", etc. [...] But apart from its misapplication to scientific matters (such as the shape of the earth), is the moral relativistic approach a useful one, despite its acceptance as an axiom in a lot of universities? Now, that is a long debate.

IMHO, the moral relativistic approach as you describe it constitutes an interesting mental exercise, but not a useful one per se.

If there is absolutely no hint or proof that something exists, how can it be useful to debate it (apart from intellectual masturbation) ?

Let's say we live in "the matrix" and that there is _absolutely_ no way to get out of it or anything that could hint its existence. Given that assumption, what is the point of debating whether it exists or not ? Even if there really was a matrix, how could it be useful for us to know this piece of information ? That knowledge wouldn't serve any purpose as the said matrix wouldn't in any way interfere with our universe and even less with our mere human lives. Of course, if there was any way to escape the matrix or if it would even subtly interact with our universe, that would be another question.

In the same vein, I dislike the concept of "agnosticism". If we had to be agnostic about everything that is not possible to prove (or even partially, through subtle hints) then we'd have to be agnostic about an amount of things only limited by our collective imagination. For instance, we'd have to be agnostic about "the matrix", the fact that our universe is an "atom" inside a much larger universe, that we're all imagining this universe through an induced dream, etc.

On a side note, this is one of the reason I find it more interesting to debate with theists that believe they have evidence for God than agnostics or theists that base their belief on faith.

PS: I'm not trying to discard philosophy and I actually admire this discipline. All I'm saying is that it should not attempt to answer the wrong questions.
I've used PRQ for about a year, and had no major problems. There was a DDoS attack at one time that broke things for a while, but other than that I've had no problems.

I had a dedicated server that ran without any problems, and when I had a few questions it was easy to get in touch via phone, mail and IRC.
Forgive me if I do not divine any great insight from your use of ellipsis. I honestly do not know what you're talking about, and your approach does not clarify anything. It is obvious that you disagree with me, but it is not obvious in what way and from what line of reasoning.

I quoted part of the article in which the author argues that what Apple has done has no place in a democratic country. I do not understand how that is not easily refuted by the fact that in this democratic country, Apple is well within their rights to do what they have done. I see one of two possibilities: 1) I have misinterpreted the passages I have directly quoted. 2) I have failed to detect the argument(s) you're referring to.

1) is plausible, but unlikely. 2) is plausible, but your response to my question does not give me any reason to believe that is the case.

The conclusion I'm left with is the one I started with: that this article is simply a poor piece of criticism.
Ask HN: Does "Think And Grow Rich" really apply to the Software industry?
I read "Think and Grow rich" by Napoleon Hill recently and have been trying to figure out how it could help me with building my Software business.
It seems like the author has very muddled notions of the separation between task parallelism and data parallelism. He talks about examples that could be data parallelism but then uses terminology like it's task parallelism. His section on race conditions is likewise muddied at best.

His basic argument at the top seems correct if you limit it to data parallelism. But if you read the rest of the article the author doesn't seem to follow the thread of his own argument.

At its core the notion that data parallelism is easier to debug than control parallelism is obvious. It is, and its often hardware supported. But unfortunately data parallelism is harder to write and often requires skill in math, so it's not used nearly so much.
The Designer's Survival Guide
Of the ongoing conflicts with 1000+ deaths per year, 6 are in Asia and only 2 are in Africa. And of those two the sudanese war, which has only resulted in ~2,500 deaths I'm not sure can be called a war.

Compare those with the wars of the 70s and 80s, I think this is a remarkable period of stability.

The coup in niger was for an actual breach of democracy - the democratically elected president tried to overstay his term, and he was stopped by the military. Which is at it should be. They have also appointed a civilian prime minister.

So things are a LOT better than before.
It's an abbreviation. I'm not writing a sociological treatise here.

How's this:

Group 1) We feel immigration hurts us economically and are generally opposed regardless of specifics (50% liberal, 50% conservative)

Group 2) We feel immigration hurts us culturally and are generally opposed regardless of specifics (95% conservative)
The raw increase performance increase that you can get from parallel processing is at the absolute maximum proportionate to the number of processors you can add to your program. Usually it is much less.

A raw performance increase is not the most common good reason for concurrency, for multiple threads or processes in an application though it's a common bad reason. Achieving a decrease in latency is one common good reason to for concurrency on a single machine.
I am not sure why people downmodded you; perhaps your tone pissed them off. You're right though, the guy basically muddies up all his concepts.
I don't think this is about startups...I think this is about bringing already semi-successful companies into US.
It's essentially DRM, except that you would be the media provider and the hosting company is the pirate. For your stuff to function you need to provide the cryptext, the decryption device and the key. So of course they have access.
This is fantastic news. DNSCurve is a good and technically sound alternative for the extremely complex DNSSEC protocol stack.
I've been using passenger + nginx very happily for a few months now. I'd highly recommend giving it another shot.
Yes, though not by much. There are two issues at play here: whether you can move to the US to start a business, and, regardless of where you run your business, how your business will operate. I think that the first issue is slightly less fair (it's more arbitrary and more ambiguous, but it's also more flexible). I think the second issue is much less fair.
I don't particularly care if they have access to the internals of my VM; I don't even care if they have the ability to log in to root using a specific ssh key (or a similar backdoor, so long as it's only accessible from within their network). Those things may be required for the reasons noted by the GoDaddy CSO.

I do care if someone uses my password to log in. I'm better than most folks at password security, but there's still too much opportunity provided by letting them have plaintext access to the password (I don't care if it's a decryptable format).
I'm in favor of drastically relaxed immigration policies for professionals. I object to this bill. I fit neither of your groups.
It's not about how many startups Indiana has. It's about Lugar.
It's actually surprisingly decent for the most part, one of the main positive changes scientific academic culture's made from traditional academic culture. If you look at 19th-century journals, you can always tell who has a Ph.D. or often even who's won various awards or been granted various honors, because they put all their titles and postnomials wherever they can. Some areas of the humanities still put authors' credentials in the author line and on their badges at conferences, but in most scientific journals you have no idea just by reading the paper which of the names are grad students vs. professors vs. research scientists.

(One exception is the IEEE, which puts author bios with their academic pedigree and current position at the end of every paper, and attaches "IEEE Fellow" in the author list to those authors who are IEEE Fellows.)
Not negative impact. I think his comment "dead man walking" was referring to the fact that they are less likely to innovate or make big changes to improve. There is always room for improve. Simple put, there are not the best VPS solution any more. But they are definitely one of the best. Others have caught up and in some cases surpassed slicehost, while Slicehost more or less stayed the same, they don't feel compelled to innovate or compete in terms of price and features. Rackspace dictates the terms.

I am a former Slicehost customer. It was simply put the best hosting solution I ever had. If I were looking for a VPS solution now, there are other good or even better solution out there.
I've written two "getting started with passenger + nginx" articles. One is for Ubuntu, one is for Mac OS X:

http://almosteffortless.com/2009/10/22/installing-varnish-wi...

http://almosteffortless.com/2009/09/16/passenger-with-nginx-...
Thanks. I completely agree. I have downplayed the option of part-time contract work for some reason. That's probably the best fit fore my life right now.

Thanks to everyone else as well, it's great to get feedback. I won't respond to everyone's post, but it's all good ideas. I mainly want to contribute valuable work to the field of CS, so doing either part-time work or graduate school is good for now.
If anyone wants to buy a ticket to the U.S., I have lots of startups you can invest in! Just send me the money and we'll start the paperwork.
404s are the new milk containers.
Yoga and Sports: Skiing