skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The list of things in the article that are 'actually hard' are all difficult problems, but I think the article glosses over the most important part: expected behavior.

If you're just trying to do some number crunching across sixteen cores, it might be pretty easy to figure out what the expected result is, since you can compare it with a single-core version of the algorithm in question to make sure your results are right. But what if you look at some real-world applications that are highly parallel?

For example, both World of Warcraft and Aion have suffered from multiple highly visible race conditions in their game mechanics. This might sound simple, but in practice players are able to actually identify those races and find ways to exploit them - sometimes it is possible to exploit them in such a way that the player is able to earn gold or other in-game rewards more rapidly than other players. Since you can often convert in-game rewards into real-world ones, I think you can see where that goes...

The most likely explanation in the above cases is that the people involved in writing the code just didn't have a good understanding of concurrency, but that can't be all there is to it, because if you watch closely, the same concurrency related issues crop up in games and related software all the time.

A significant issue here is that in complex systems, it can be impossible to distinguish between a race condition and expected behavior. If your game has a button labelled 'win match', and two players press the button, which one should win the match? Do you compare the timestamps on the TCP packets that say they pressed the button, ignoring the impact of network latency? Do you try and compare local time data from their machines, ignoring the impact of clock drift? What if, by some fluke of nature, they both send in a request with the exact same timestamp? In a simple case, you'd never see this, but when you have 11+ million customers playing on a daily/weekly basis, such things can happen.
This would reduce the number of EB-2 and EB-3 visas available per year. Unused EB-5 visas spill over to EB-1, EB-1 to EB-2, EB-2 to EB-3. You are proposing to take the EB-5 spillover and give it to a group of people hand-picked by investors. That means little to know spillover from EB-5 -> EB-3. EB-3 applications will wait longer, and fewer of them will get their green cards every year.
Being physically larger and stronger makes people look to you for leadership. It's hardwired biological behavior. Maybe in a million years this'll change.
An good friend of mine toys around with tesla coils quite a bit. Here's his tesla coil page: http://dzl.dk/projects/tesla/tesla.html

A few years ago he got involved in a pretty crazy project: Another friend (artist type) had heard that as long as you didn't touch the ground you could actually sit on top of a tesla coil and have huge sparks coming out of your fingers. He promptly went out and got some funding to make a 3 meter tall coil, and toured around Copenhagen sitting on top of it with lighting coming out of his outstretched hands. I'm somewhat surprised he survived, but it looked damn cool.
"Keep off the pounds or lose your mind more rapidly."
Lots of people think they understand multithreading because they understand the synchronization primitives.

Well yeah. But the primitives aren't "synchronized hash maps", they're "transactions".
Last time I was thinking about it, I got to a more optimistic solution... but time will verify what is true. A couple of ideas: If someone moves around, he/she's probably more capable of adaptation than many others. He/she's probably also more intelligent than an average Joe. They're also less likely to have a family and probably around the age where they might want one. So it's quite probable, that it's really a migration of talent. This talent positively influences the destination country (as do the taxes you pay there)... In the end - one might hope that by migrating, you're not only helping themselves, but voting with their actions and supporting the laws they accept...

Oh well... time to go back to reality ;)
well hardly every since. the thing that prompted it was a HN post on how to get in touch with PG; and I have really strong memories of the Viaweb story, mostly around my dad's heart attack. Check here: http://bit.ly/5e0XxJ

Bear in mind, this was in the days well before blogging when getting any story out involved fighting for column cm with other journalist, and a (necessarily) sceptical business editor. I know, it seems antiquated now!

And I am not sure I said it was news. And yes, you may get semantic about this being news.ycombinator, but i'll leave you to do the detailed analysis of what qualifies since you have the media studies degree.
CEO: Viability of Classmates.com business model 'not in question'
Canada has something similar.
http://www.canadaimmigrationlaw.net/Immigration/investor.htm
The Startup Visa: Create Jobs, Get A Green Card
Maker of strip poker apps sounds off on Apple ban: 'It sucks'
Many countries, Canada included, have bilateral agreements on only taxing income once. So, if these people you know make money off foreign property, they pay taxes on it in the country where it is located. They do not have to pay taxes again in Canada. Which I think is fair: would you want to pay double taxes on your income?
It effectively reduces the number of EB-2 and EB-3 visas available per year. That is my main objection to it. (I explained how in my two most recent posts in other threads of this discussion).

I recommend everybody to read the proposed change to the law. It is a very small "patch" that is easy to read and understand, especially once you've read the rest of the discussion on this topic.
So forgive me if this sounds jaded, but I fail to see how this technology is a "game changer."

1. Based on the EIA Annual Energy Review 2001 transmission losses only account for 3.1% of total power generation in the U.S.

2. A modern, large gas combined-cycle power plant has a quoted efficiency of over 60%
http://www.energy.siemens.com/hq/en/power-generation/power-p...

3. From the presentation: "The carbon footprint is 50% cleaner than the grid and 100% renewable" Wait a minute, if the power generation is truly renewable, then how can it have a carbon footprint at all (other than manufacture etc.)? Isn't the whole point of renewable energy to have a perpetually renewing "closed system"? By that definition then the carbon footprint would be tiny compared to the grid.

The reason they say 50% is probably because they are thinking most people will run the units from gas, but that's definitely not renewable.
Also, I can't imagine the efficiency of the unit is much higher than 50-60%, but maybe there's some data on that which I have missed.

4. "They have created 11,000,000 kilowatts so far" How much of this is from the burning of fossil fuels versus renewable fuel sources?

I am all for fuels cells and development of renewable energy. I think what would truly be a "game changer" is if this device could be used to store the cyclical output from a local renewable energy power system - for example store the energy created during the day from a PV installation for use at night.
In my opinion this is more "green washing" than green.

edit: formatting
IMO, What country you should be in depends on who your customers are. Based on my experience, as a startup you should be where your customers are. If I was creating a business targeted at people in my home country, I would stay there and raise money there.

In this case, I am creating a business whose customers are in the U.S. And so, so am I. Just on a much slower route to permanent residency.

Were I not already in the U.S., other reasons for me to go the EB6 route rather than do business there could be

(1)If it is much much much harder to get VC in my home country

(2) If the kind of business I want to start can only be done in the U.S.
Cool - I think there is a balance between too much and too little content and I think you're closer to the mark now than before. Good luck and hopefully it works out for you!
I learned something like this a few years ago when I was a contractor. If the skills I had were in the job description (e.g. "C# programmer wanted! Need someone experienced with embedded systems!"), I charged myself at fairly high rate. If the job I was applying for didn't specify the skills (e.g. "I want someone to program a cell phone application."), I charged a lower rate.

Invariably, the person who knew the exact technical skills they were looking for was willing to pay more for those skills than the person that knew what they wanted, but didn't know what went into making it.
in the case of dividends, you are correct, you have to pay corp tax on your cash before you can hand it out as dividends (then the shareholders have to pay capital gains tax on it.) however, if the company immediately re-invests its cash, they don't have to pay corp. taxes on it. In theory, you could build a service-based business (where I am, that means no sales tax) that say, grew for a year on it's own revenue but paid no corp tax (in California and many other places there is a minimum tax, but that's small enough to ignore for this) then, at the end of the year, you could flip the company to some investors, and all your profits would be taxed only once, and at the lower capital gains rate.
Usually "no" adds nothing to the discussion. However, in this context I read it as "Obviously, no. The post author clearly hasn't put much thought on what they wrote, so let's not even bother dissecting it". In a way, it is a constructive comment in the sense that it prevents fruitless discussion.

Of course one could just flag the post but that isn't as visible.
It's fast loading, graphically pleasing, and interesting.

However, I wouldn't call it innovative. I had to stare at it for 10 seconds before I realized a menu wasn't going to popup. Then I spend the next few seconds clicking the boxes, which weren't clickable. Only then did I realize the navigation on the bottom.

And after writing this, I still don't have a clue as to the purpose of the page.
Not fair. Google bans adsense on Techwankers.
Yes, exactly. We hear WooThemes has a great bussiness, but I doubt maintaning such a site is a passive income...it must be lotta work to do it. In my humble opinion, passive income is for example when you developed a set of websites, with steady SE traffic, and you monetize the pageviews by ads, doing nothing after the site was created. Actually I am starting to do that and so far it seems to work. ;)
Dumb Terminals, Redux: Pano Logic
>(I have no horse in this race; living in Europe, the idea of a visa seems a bit anachronistic, really.)

Heh, there are still people in EU countries (Romania, Bulgaria the least) that need visas to work in another EU country. So it's not all rosy within EU borders either.
Blockbuster boss: Greedy studios killing online video-on-demand
Phusion Passenger uses Unix sockets to communicate with backend processes since version 1.0.
This seems like a really bad article - trying to compare "white supremacy" to "gender stereotypes".

There is a huge difference between a child killing himself (suicide) and lynching. The author should maybe consult a dictionary if he/she does not see a difference. The author also seems to be a proponent for “legal solutions” to playground taunts – this is just ridiculous.

Everyone has stereotypes and prior beliefs, society and subgroups have many unspoken rules. This clearly is not the place for laws to regulate stereotypes and beliefs. Everyone gets bullied and everyone gets taunted (I was too).

The question should be why the depression in children was not noticed by either their teachers or their care-givers. Surely someone would notice if something was seriously wrong with a child?

Another problem that is often overlooked and not adequately addressed is the incidence of depression in children.

I guess this author had a prior axe to grind though.
Indeed. Cope's musical grammar would be a great place to start hacking around. This reminds also of the iMUSE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMUSE) from the SCUMM game engine, which would improvise soundtrack transitions based on motifs and in-game events.
In South Texas a lot of the houses are heated with electricity. In my parents neighborhood they don't even have natural gas available to the houses at all.
Haha. I understand.
I manage my own, but I do that for my other jobs as well. So I guess you could say I'm a part time sysadmin.

I say do it yourself. You don't have that much fine tuning to do. I just personally doubt that you're going to get very good "management" from your provider. It will be most useful in a situation of "please install nginx to run on a separate IP so I can serve static content." It will not be useful in preventing attacks, etc.

Although I guess they could have really high service quality, I believe most places will scrimp on the services b/c they need to compete on the price. And the whole reason for going managed is the services.
Great, that's good to hear. Thanks.
this is really the big issue; translating sites are easy. Providing ongoing support in 5 languages, means having separate dedicated support teams. I'm interested to see how they handle this.
Some people might remember letsbuyit.com from the late nineties and early noughties. If I remember correctly it had the exact same idea. The site seems to be still up with the same brand, but it seems to have become some sort of "shopping community" without the group buying feature. You might want to find out what happened to them.
Ask HN: Blog on Interview question re: side projects.
Hi all,

I read a blog linked on HN that basically was about the single best interview question, which was asking about side projects. The gist of the article was that really good developers/designers always have a side project, or blog - something that they work on during their spare time.

Does anyone remember that?
Height matters. So does general health. That's not the same as "prowess." Now, I don't deny that prowess is helpful. Julius Caesar was known as an excellent horseman and a brave leader in battle, Vladimir Putin milks his judo black belt, etc. But the claim that athleticism has traditionally been the key to power is clearly overblown. Bill Bradley, Jack Kemp, and how many others? "[T]he leader of the pack has long been achieved by sweat and blood" is simply untrue.

Being a good athlete may make other kids look instinctively to you, but that's just an opportunity to learn leadership skills. Other kids have different opportunities, and after high school, those opportunities multiply and diversify. Prowess doesn't guarantee that you'll develop alpha male skills, and even in high school, there are star players who don't have much influence over their peers. Likewise, on any high school football team, you'll find one or two starters who aren't the best performers at their position but provide valuable leadership for the other players.

People really need to sort out two distinct concepts: social rank and masculinity. Geeks talk a lot about "alpha males," but they're also jealous of the beefy guy down the street who washes his Corvette shirtless and always has a girl hanging around. It doesn't matter whether that guy gets ordered around by a short bald guy and would have been in the Paleolithic, too. The dude is masculine. And he gets chicks (which I suspect is the common factor that creates geeky interest in both social rank and masculinity.)

While social rank and masculinity are not entirely unrelated, geeks conflate them way too much, and I think this article is a prime example. Rough, tough, strong, assertive guys can end up as leaders or followers, socially climbing or falling relative to their origins, and that's been true in every complex society, meaning the phenomenon has been around for thousands of years. Geeks are interested in both social rank and masculinity and would benefit from treating them as distinct ideas, but they prefer to lump them both under the label of "alpha male" because it sounds more intellectual (and probably less homoerotic, to boot.)

[Sorry for the huuuuuge edit after I was already modded up once....]
Well, I've seen it taught that a "computer architecture" is really the CPU's instruction set (i.e. ISA, instruction set architecture), without particular regard for the specific performance (e.g. in terms of clock cycles) or implementation. And that was from the CS side of the school ... (Also seems to be the line at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_architecture )
Interesting, I'm getting downvoted for telling the truth. Maybe I should just go with the HN flow so here it goes:

Git still doesn't work well on windows and it's damn slow and only 2 years old, also running it with cygwin was a pain because you had to install it manually and stuff. High 5 y'all!

/me disappointed by HN, expected better than reddit like users.
I just have to include the iconic SHODAN quote:

"Look at you, hacker. A pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?"

I wonder if the creators of the search engine are aware that a.) SHODAN wasn't the hacker. b.) SHODAN tried repeatedly to kill the hacker. And c.) the situation didn't turn out particularly well for SHODAN.
The trouble with drinking, the trouble with me
This look really useful: only use the potentially high latency consistent read operations when you really need them.

BTW, I have noticed something that one of my customers concurs with: using SimpleDB remotely has extremely high latency (while not running on an EC2 instance). This increased latency seems much larger that hitting a Rails app on port 80 using HTTP. Anyone have an explanation why remotely hitting SimpleDB is slow but hitting a web site hosted on an EC2 instance is fast?
We posted a comical (and informative) post about this a few months ago. We're calling this Victory Update #1 (and it is, it really is).

Who would have thought...John Kerry is the latest Wizard in the "Lord of the Visa."

http://blog.vidli.com/startup-visa/
A couple more along those lines:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2008/03/a-gentle-reminder...

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/12/grow-fat-and-lazy...

There's a lot of research to link accumulated visceral fat tissue to aspects of accelerated degenerative aging. Also, separately, a weight of research linking the body's responses to the overeating and lack of exercise needed for most people to build up that fat to aspects of accelerated degenerative aging.
A few thoughts off the top of my head (feel free to contact me out of band if you want more...)

- text is nearly unreadable
- there's no separation for any of the posts. no rankings, you can't visually separate elements within the post. there are too many of them on there -- which do I read first? Should I read them all, or just the top one? Are they in some sort of order? A visual redesign will help will all these things.
- Can I post w/o creating an account? I hate creating an account places. Why do I need to do that? It's not obvious that I need to create an account to post.
- Who are these people? Are they users, or celebrities? Is this their twitter feed?

I'd focus on visual design. You don't really have too much "usability" that's very complex.
I'm generally not a big fan of Spolsky's writing. He tends to read too much like a sales person, and too little like an engineer for me to enjoy his writing.

This is a great read though, even if you already switched to git, because the two are so similar.
The Google one from last week?

If not, try this..

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:ycombinator.co...
It looks very vaguely like the New England Patriots' logo...?
Google censoring content that criticizes it
What's these guy's connection to The Pirate Bay? I've heard all of the following:

1) TPB owns them
2) Its a spin-off of TPB
3) They currently host TPB
4) They used to host TPB and no longer do so
5) The two are unrelated

Does anyone know?
Sergey Brin on Google's China decision
It's been taken offline for now:

http://gizmodo.com/5479497/apple-removes-explicit-option-fro...
Due to its user submitted content, isn't youtube just banned outright in China?
That was my initial thought as well.
1000+ shell companies to hide patent lawsuits? Brilliant!
As long as you're talking to your service over SSL, basic auth is the way to go for non-human APIs.

As for hiding it from regular users, just make sure you never send a 401 response. If the user has accessed a protected resource without providing an authentication cookie, send a 302 to your login page like you (probably) normally would.

Ideally API users would get a 401 to prompt them to supply authentication, but if you can count on API users supplying their credentials with every request, you avoid that issue. And if that really bugs you you can probably figure out from the headers whether you're talking to a browser or a web service and send the appropriate response.
From the article: "We need great weight loss drugs that adjust the metabolism to keep weight off without side effects."

Or we could encourage healthier lifestyles. A good start would be introducing requirements for pedestrian footpaths and bike lanes in new communities. Trying to walk or ride a bike in many recently built communities is either impossible or scary.

That's just one idea, there's a lot of others out there. The bottom line is that if we sit on our butts all day and eat high-caloric sugary foods, then we're going to get fat. That's simply the way our biology is wired. I have a hard time imagining that any new wonder-drug is going to change those fundamentals.
I had never the story that Arthur Anderson was prosecuted with trumped-up charges. Is the author's account accurate?
If hundreds of people within the company can reverse the encryption on a password it might as well be in plain text.
I wonder if this Dioxygen Difluoride + Hydrogen Sulfide reaction could be harnessed as an ultra-dense fuel source for an internal combustion engine.
The entire point of that section of the DMCA was to make it easy for rights-holders to get something pulled from a site. While the DMCA definitely puts too much power in the hands of rights-holders, the previous method was to sue the infringer and then wait for a court to issue an injunction (which could tend to take a while; the courts aren't really known for their speedy service).

Rights-holders obviously don't like the idea that the infringing material just sits there being distributed to anyone that wants it while all the legal ducks are lined up for filing suit and petitioning a judge to issue the injunction.

> If I was to claim Microsoft infringed my copyright, would they take microsoft.com offline for 10 days?

The big players obviously have the rules bent for them, especially since they have large legal teams. I assume that if you have a large, highly-paid legal team, your hosting provider might also let you leave your content up with the understanding that your legal team will help them out if the DMCA-notice-issuer comes a-knockin'. Either that, or they make enough money off of your account to warrant paying legal fees to defend themselves in order to keep you as a happy customer.

In your example, Microsoft would probably just remove the offending material, then rush the court documents to get a suit underway so that a judge could issue a ruling allowing them to distribute it while the matter was decided.
http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/9587992205
In fact, I think above a certain IQ range, people tends to make less money. Studies have shown PHDs actually on average make less than people with a master's degree.

Also, girls don't really rationally think about attraction, which is why a lot of them date better looking guys who later dump them while nicer guys get left by the side of the roads.

From my own experience, getting a master degree in Comp Sci has not helped me in getting a girl. However, working out 2-3 times a week and being more physically attractive has.