skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course it adds to the discussion, because the point was that the overwhelming majority of the market does not need this kind of scale.

"End of an era" signals a major shift across the market, not that the tiny bleeding edge has moved on to something different.
I was with my brother and we had just arrived at his home when the quake struck. I have to say it felt much more violent than it actually was. The damages seem to be surprisingly fewfor a quake of this magnitude.

I ended up going home at about 5 am as I wasn't able to get through on the phone. Luckily, there were several folks who gave me rides that got me a lot closer, so I didn't have to walk far. The whole city was dark, but I didn't see major signs of damages along the way.
I recognize this, it was auto-generated by the Arrogant Crank's Mad-Lib Blog Tool. Seriously, plug in 'work life balance' and this could be the year 2000, 'too much tv' and its 1990... Will this be all we hear for the next decade as social games take over and Jesse Schell is proved correct?
Photoshop and Photography: When Is It Real?
more people [play FarmVille] than have Twitter accounts

but will they in a year? Two years?

FarmVille seems to be an incredible fad to me; finally people can play a game with their real friends' names.

But in the end I have to wonder about what the possible value of such games is. Surely not too many people with any purchasing power are wasting time tending to an imaginary cow or whatever.
I really like the front page's simplicity

I signed up about two months ago. I was pretty disappointed because I thought the purpose was to list all your online activities, tweets, facebook updates, blog entries, flickr photos, youtube favorites in one stream. But instead it allows you to create a button to each one and customize the layout a little bit...

Anyways, it was a bit of a disappointment. But here's my flavors.me: http://flavors.me/arnorhs
I used to brush my teeth reliably, but half-halfheartedly, not being the slightest bit attentive. Then I put $4,000 into my mouth in a few months, and my viewpoint shifted completely. Now I pay attention when I brush.
They're very good at selling, but not so good at engineering. It's an average database product, with a ruthless sales team.
Not in the "services" area, but in the description you can.
Funny how even Helvetica needs to be rendered by flash. Signed up, saw that and deleted the account.
Play it on our site and the achievements are permanent and public:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/ArmorGames/achievement-unloc...
Here's a different way to use games to motivate people:

http://www.google.com/buzz/amichail/PduXBSByfSD/Game-driven-...
Well, for one thing, Sun has long been a hardware-centric Unix powerhouse, and Oracle is a software company that focuses on databases and rebranded Linux distributions...
Well, if the space heater is ready "in fifty years or so" and the bonfire is right here, right now, then I think I'll take the bonfire. ;)
Coupons? For what? More toothpaste? I buy six-month-supplies as is.

And the whole thing seems to depend on this internal acceptance that what corporation A says is good for me, I should do. I would hazard a guess that there are plenty of people who will not just swallow that whole. OK, there may be plenty that do .. but the types of people who market to them are scum.
Wide Finder, Scala charges to 3rd place
Look at it this way, if you went in to take music lessons and your music teacher told you that in order to get to 'level 3' trumpet player you'd need to spend X years and Y thousands of dollars, you'd instantly see it was ridiculous.

There are widespread teaching systems for musical instruments that work exactly like this. Especially for piano and orchestral instruments. There are organized competitions for different "levels" and books of exercises and pieces also divided into levels. Even within orchestras, there is leveling - you're either violin 1 or violin 2, within those groupings you're first chair, second chair, and so forth.

I always found the piano contests a bit ridiculous, but with an orchestra you do need some sort of leveling system to filter people into the various roles.
Suborbital Safety: Will Commercial Spaceflight Ramp Up the Risk?
An interesting article, but full of speculation. Many assumptions where made to produce the conclusions and the data (like an asteroid being worth 20 trillion).

Yes, I agree with many of the predictions of the article. Like how private industry will take over the space exploration. But the opinion of the author and I is about as valuable as a crystal ball.

If we are going to play the speculation game, here is what interests me about the subject.

1) Who would get the mining rights in space?
Or would it be a 'gold rush?' If so, would it be like international waters with no laws?
Could I achieve my childhood dream of being a space pirate? ;)

2) Most of the asteroids of our solar system take months to reach reach with our fastest ships. If you want a human presence we are talking YEARS. Humans on prolonged space flights are very, very tricky to take care of. That makes a strong case for only sending robots, and that would require some very wicked AI, since the transmission times for controls would be too great.

Think about all the hazards and procedures the robot(s) would have to perform. Guidance, acquisition, positioning, detection of surroundings, plotting return course, AVOIDANCE, ext. And the hardware implications, the fuel, the power, capturing, ext.

It would make a Mars rover look like an RC car. And the two mars rovers cost us approx. 820 million dollars.

The cost of development may be justified by a 20 trillion dollar prize, but the cost to buy in is very high.
If a corporation did want to fund it with billions of dollars without knowing if they were going to see a return, and willing to wait years for it. Then you have a winner, I don't see anyone jumping at the bit to take that risk though.

3) While asteroid mining seems like a great idea. Why are aren't we being more creative about the other things we can do in space? Where is the startup mentality?

How about technicians that repair satellites in orbit? Great place to hone the programing for the asteroid gatherers.
Just curious -- what does $4k get you? A couple of root canals & crowns?
Well, I just tried to send you an email to ask some advice on running an email server, but it got rejected:

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

brk@notoriousbrk.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 553 553 5.3.0 <brk@notoriousbrk.com>... >brk<@notoriousbrk.com. (state 14).
Is George Soros now aiming to "crash the Euro"?
This gives me an idea for a startup... maybe i'll call it StrangerCookup.com
What is the focus of Yahoo? What does it do? It grew up as a search and catalog company. Then it got in to content. Then mail. Then 50 other things. What is the unifying theme to all this? "Connecting people to content" could be anything. All of us who run online sites connect people to content. Perhaps the current management is getting Yahoo there, but where's the focus? Where's the soul of this company anymore? A decline may be ok if there is a light at the end of the tunnel where they start to grow again, or sustain what they have. Think Detroit mayor trying to downsize the city in to something manageable to make it livable and prosperous again.
There are few effective business models where the initial customer choices are 'register' or 'wait for a video to download'. Especially if the latter boils down to a slower version of the former with a catchy tune.
I second this guys opinion!
Mostly several miserable afternoons with a drill whining in my mouth, wishing I were still at work. Motivations varies from person to person, but a personal investment, not necessarily of money, is the key.

P.S. the 4K was just my part; insurance paid the bulk of it.
If you're looking for a place to publish I've been working on a food oriented website, and I'd love to host it!
I disagree with his statement that learning is not itself an achievement. I enjoy learning on its own, and see it as an achievement in itself. I often learn things without the goal of applying them to anything in life, just the goal to learn them and know about them.
I failed to notice this and it did end up posting a Twitter message under my name (I'd like to think I missed a checkbox somewhere), so I deleted my account :\
Rick Sharples of Red Hat on Java Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6)
I wish I could make my pal, who used to work for Oracle, write down some of the Oracle "war" stories which he told to me. But in essence what henrikschroder says is the truth.
Low-tech? Maybe. One, it takes a long time to design and commission a new modern naval vessel, aircraft, or even a tank. A decade or more. So most on-board electronics, including CPUs and displays will be outdated at any given time — somewhat outdated to possibly very old. (Side note: I've always been amazed at how quickly new ship and plane designs came out in war-time in the 1940s, but they were much simpler then and evolving much more rapidly. Can't really compare a P-51 Mustang to an F-22.)

Two, I don't really want the Navy finding bugs in the latest hardware. Better run an older, well-tested CPU than find a reactor control system crashing because of a f00f bug. :)
directly from isbn.nl
> I don't know if you were paying attention when, after Congress first rejected TARP, the stock market shot down severely again.

The stock market isn't the economy. Its moves now are somewhat independent of "life on the street". (That was even more true during the great depression.)

> There are many people out there that believe the dollar will crash

The dollar has weak for almost 10 years. It didn't and hasn't moved much.
I think that is well put. It is fairly trivial to project (in the mathematical sense) most any human activity in a way that makes it seem useless or worse than. Strangely these projections tend leave the projector in a still elevated position.
You can fork it from http://github.com/sinatra/sinatra-book
I wish Oracle would just release ZFS under GPL. I know a lot of people say that Btrfs will be as good. But I say let both out of the box (Btrfs is already available under GPL) and let the best system win.
Because it's a test of fitness, physical ability, and a lot of other skills that are extremely valuable to the human organism?
My favorite lines -- totally resonated with me:

They simply got tired of working for others, had a great idea they wanted to commercialize, or woke up one day with an urgent desire to build wealth before they retired. So they took the big leap.
This idea has (roughly) occurred to me, too, and it's cool to see someone implement it. Its simplicity is well-done. Suggestion: make it even simpler. Don't require a login. Just let someone start connecting and designing, and then they'll want to have a username etc.
I mean day, not year. Hehe.
For me that is typical of bad lawyers - getting bogged down in silly little fights about their own egos rather than the big picture of actually getting the deal done.

Totally different from other professions. Programmers would never act like this!
The comment that asked "Quick question: can I get in trouble for posting this letter online..." ;)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1154198
Ruby official mirror on Github
I got 243 points for using HN!
Possible tsunami anticipated to hit Hawaii 11:19 a.m. HST / 4:19 p.m. EST
Genius is misunderstood as a bolt of lightning
I think the author means it doesn't discriminate between misbehaving/loitering youth (a small fraction, which the stores are trying to drive away) and all other youth.
I couldn't agree any more. I definitely wasn't a stereotypical "sells lemonade door-to-door" entrepreneur in school, or in college. Sounds cliche, but I just didn't care about money. I was more interested in hacking and creating, starting from Legos, ZX Spectrum computer, etc.

It was only after I entered a corporate hell, was greatly dissatisfied with it, and read some books that opened my eyes on the whole issue, that I realized that I needed to be an entrepreneur to really achieve my dreams.

I'm still much better at hacking than business, but I'm learning, and I believe that eventually, with lots of hard work and some luck, I could be as successful as some "natural-born" entrepreneurs, if not more.
US government's financial position hit $11.46 trillion deficit in 2009
Looks like the import didn't go so well, as all the tags are listed as branches, instead of, well, tags.

Is there any sort of announcement of the move?
Sorry, but this rebuttal is a perfect example of turd polishing. The experience described in '16 Things Your Lawyer Won't Tell You' is exactly the experience I had with lawyers. After working with lawyers in the music industry and software industry, one thing is certain, lawyers are only practicing, but expect a big bill.
Perhaps this is simplistic, but I believe it has succeeded in the form of web APIs/REST/etc.
Right. You could say that. That said, I'm sure that feels a little ridiculous to you. That money can be a treadmill, though, is as old as time. Haven't you seen A Christmas Carol? Scrooge and Marley made money like bandits.
I wish they would release it under BSD or MIT, so we could truly have it on all platforms.
We don't have a two party system but we have a bi-factional ruling coalition.

Great choice of words. I love how it applies equally well to the USA and China. I agree, of course, and think it applies to most modern democracies, in whom I have zero faith.
pedalpete we were trying to hint at that by our slogan "one image endless possibilities and we do support chrome. If anyone is interested in a free trial or promotional rates contact me at

imageterrainjm@gmail.com
Bless the building codes. Just read this article a couple days ago in the NY Times:

"Disaster Awaits Cities in Earthquake Zones"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/science/earth/25quake.html...

Hate to think what would have happened (or will happen) if a quake like this hit Istanbul.
Awesome! Any word on if they're gonna swap bug trackers? Lighthouse would be a big step up.
I think it's lovely. Used to have a site background just like it.
Darcs 2.4: the latest and greatest in easy version control
Oh, yeah, that's what I thought it was too. I really want that site. I've almost built it for myself a few times now, but I haven't quite decided how to normalize for frequency. I don't want my twitter updates drowning out all the less frequent but far more interesting content I might have out there.
It's up to you to decide. Go climb a mountain, or go play WoW. In my view the guy's not full of it, he only wants people to be aware of, and make conscious decisions about how they spend their. Some people do, but many people don't. Including me, which is why I'm here at HN writing this comment. :)
Big mistake by the developers. Also a reason I tend to try sites like this with my disposable twitter / gmail accounts.

All in all, I do like the site and the idea. Very similar to hi.im, but a tad more stylish.
What's good about that guarantee? Remember TANSTAAFL. Any time there is a Governmental "free lunch" that most people don't want or use, it's just favoring a few people at the expense of everyone else.
Yeah, it looks as though it's a work in progress, rather than a working import. I'd be amazed if there wasn't an announcement on the github blog when the repository is actually ready.
2010 Jaguar XJ Reviews, Prices, Wallpapers, Videos, Specifications, Features
All about new Jaguar XJ Series. Cool car. Check it out.
$3K (plus insurance) got me a couple root canals, 3 crowns, and a night guard a couple years. Probably the best $3k I ever spent. Now I floss nightly. (I also chew more sugarless gum during the day.) But I've stopped wearing the night guard.
Although I don't disagree that one's achievements in a computer game aren't necessarily meaningful(although this is a personal decision), I disagree entirely with his assertion that all computer games are "treadmills that are impossible to fail at". Anyone who plays any game with a competitive focus will know this is false. It's very possible to fail at Starcraft or Warcraft III. I certainly fail at WC3. I'm not absolutely horrible, but if I played with any remotely good player, I would lose quickly every single time. It's not just possible to fail, it's normal for almost everyone to fail. In fact, if you consider losing a single game to be failing in that game, exactly 50% of all multiplayer SC or WC3 players fail. In free-for-all FPS games, the frequency of failure is even higher.
I don't get the upvotes for this comment.

Most of the philosophers we revere did exactly this -- define and put forth universal ideas for what is meaningful in life. No one is forcing these ideas on you, and it's easy to take shots at the "man in the arena" who steps forward to tackle a subject. I found it pretty interesting, as I had never thought much about the impact of this new class of "achievement" modern society has created.

These kinds of reactions only stifle dialogue and debate. I think it's generally understood that this is his opinion, and that he doesn't have designs to become a dictator and make this opinion the law of the land.
He mentions "multitouch" as one of the staggering UI failures.
I had chatted with one of the guys at HiiDef a few weeks ago, apparently they are in hire mode and prefer east coasters: http://jobs.hiidef.com/
Exactly right. Life is in fact devoid of meaning except for the meaning you choose to apply to it yourself. This includes playing computer games, spending time on facebook, climbing mountains or a career ladder and having a wife, children and a happy dog.
Here's a rebuttal that I've seen linked all over the place, especially by game designers, anxious that their lofty dreams of high art will fall by the wayside to creating simple carrots on sticks.

http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2010/2/22/external-rewards-and-je...
Lot's of things are tests of and do improve those things. I got really high is sort of a silly statement.
People on Twitter are reporting tsunami warnings in Hawaii. Can anyone there give an update?
Being a lawyer and a lawmaker at the same time is a conflict of interest.
Why seeding is important for random functions
The Boston Globe's Big Picture has a good colleciton of photos from the disaster area.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/02/earthquake_in_chile...
It's just an official mirror: http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-core/...
"Trying to define what should be meaningful for other people is pretty arrogant and an insular perspective on life." - I think this statement is lazy in that it's taking the cultural relativist approach. By this token, we shouldn't make judgment on female circumcision in Africa, or the one child rule in China. In their societies these practices have very important value but I think most of us probably feel like it's morally wrong.

I think we can argue there there is a world where there should exist universal qualities. I certainly wont knock the author for trying to argue video games inherently don't have the same value as say "going for a walk" and helping your family or community...
If it makes you feel any better, I enjoy taking potshots at revered ethicists as well.
A meta-level true random number generator [pdf]
Or for those who dislike fink:

>brew install wget

(readme at http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew )

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1095793 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=840317 )
Except for progress in metallurgy and materials science. That's real annealing.
s/lazy/existentialist

Universal right and wrong just isn't my thing. YMMV
This is pretty awesome, Hang. It might be cool to have you as an honored guest at one of the dinner parties I run/attend fairly regularly: either here in Berkeley with a collection of East Bay scientists, artists and entrepreneurs, or in SF with the same crowd (and more of a social gaming slant...)

Send me a message at dani.fong@gmail.com

PS: The 'I Will Cook for You' strategy netted me a couch to sleep on for a month and a room thereafter, plus a bunch of new best friends.
Don't they mean debt? I thought deficit was net increase in debt per year.
I agree. Everything has edge cases, no matter what your position. The world doesn't neatly fit into our tidy little concepts of morality.

However, ignore the edge cases and there isn't so much ambiguity. Take the average American sitting down to a meal--why does he choose to eat beef? Typically it is out of habit or to please the palate. In the typical case, this act is harmful to the health of this person. This act also ends the life of a sentient being whose brain is developed enough to experience pain, emotions, and even develop social relationships. I don't see much ethical gray area here: a desire to please the palate would be trumped by another sentient being's desire to continue living and live free of pain and suffering.

Also, I doubt you would consistently hold to this position: "realize the ambiguity, complexity and downright contradictions that are endemic to our existence" if you were on the receiving end of the pain and suffering. If someone kidnapped your daughter and prostituted her out, for example, I doubt that you would find comfort in the fact that life is "ambiguous and complex".
Designing Parallel Algorithms - Part I
This is like saying 'marathoners are not made, they're born'. It's a combination of factors. Lots of people have the entrepreneurial spirit, but are not entrepreneurs.
What about all the 'idea' people who don't execute? where do they fall? are they entrepreneurs?

Couldn't we equally say the common factor is people who 'simply got tired of working for others, had a great idea they wanted to commercialize, or woke up one day with an urgent desire to build wealth before they retired. So they took the big leap.'

Is an "Entrepreneur" anything more than a person with a 'get it done, and do it right' mentality?
No, waves are anticipated, tsunamis a possibility.
"""The actor model has no direct notion of inheritance or hierarchy, which means it is time consuming and confusing to program actors with trends of common behaviour."""

Mozart/oz allows you to easily implement actors which also have OO inheritance.

Generally, many superior programming paradigms (logic, constraint, functional, concurrent) have been ignored by the computing industry which has probably cost it billions of dollars in lost productivity.
Once the transition is complete this should help to increase the quality and speed of development on Ruby. It is amazing how much contributions on projects go up, when moved to git/github.
Yahoo is still big in japan.