skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the main issues here are ones of capital scale and efficiency. I believe 37Signals' tenets work well for low headcount, extremely capital-efficient businesses such as software development, hedge fund management, or specialty insurance.

Unfortunately, there are many enterprises (drug research, agriculture, smelting, office construction, theme parks, waste processing, private space exploration, etc.) which are fundamentally dependent on large amounts of capital both during the start-up phase as well as to ensure daily continuity of operations.

Most of these capital intensive business also demand a reasonably large staff to support these daily workflows.

With a larger staff comes the increasing probability that one bad apple will be hired. Just one bad apple can bring an entire enterprise down without a reasonable set of security and trust-limiting thresholds on capital expenditures and workflow control. The Union Carbide chemical spill in Bhopal and the Barings bank collapse come immediately to mind.

A prominent COO once told me that for every 100 hires, he expected to pick-up 1 bad apple every 2 years. In his context a "bad apple" was someone whom, over time, would repeatedly and deliberately attempt to criminally defraud, sabotage, or publicly discredit the company.

With those odds, basic human nature, and capital-intensive business economics, it's not hard to see why these enterprise's mores on debt and individual trust run counter to 37Signals' philosophy.
I've heard people say almost exactly the same things about horse races and craps, but in reality both of those are -EV. As far as my understanding of economics goes, day trading is 0EV at best, -EV when transaction costs are considered. I'd rather gamble when it's +EV--and then, gamble a small amount a large number of times to ride out the variance.
> Questions like that are where serious moral discussions begin.

I don't think moral discussion should focus on unpleasant edge cases. More interesting and useful is how to handle more common situations.
Why not just adopt multiple formats or no format at all?

HTML5's video tag supports multiple formats (it always has) and the spec does not mandate any specific codec. Nobody is proposing to adopt h.264 as part of the standard.
If that were to happen, someone could fork the site using the last CC-licensed data dump. I would hope that would happen immediately upon any change in licensing away from CC/GPL/GFDL/similar.

It's not impossible but they can't just make off with the data in the way that CDDB did.

(Now, if you want to talk about a company abusing the community ... look at Yelp.)
I like the idea, but HTTP requests are painfully slow compared to a database hit. What if the API takes a second to respond? You'll be serving far fewer pages. One thing I do like is this statement:

"Why not memcached? Memcached is a great project and we wouldn't say a bad thing about it. However, there are many cases where setting up and managing your own infrastructure for caching doesn't make sense."

I'm glad to see they aren't trying to trick you into thinking this is the superior solution. Rather, they focus on how it's the easiest solution (or easier than setting-up memcached anyway).

I think this is a really cool idea.
Eventually, you will want to ask one of 3 questions. Here are the answers so you don't have to:

1) www.searchyc.com
2) Comment quality will vary. Don't discuss, just Erlang.
3) No, I don't know where Nickb is either.
I counter your example by proposing that we are headed for a world where my unborn children and grandchildren would be monitored and reevaluated until that confidence level is as small as society will demand, and that treatment responses will not be limited to a simple extinguishing of life. It then becomes acceptable loss.

I believe this is the key message that Sam Harris wanted to deliver is that technology will significantly swing the power of scientific methods in relevant moral debates.
There is a difference in that sugar is mostly protected with quotas, while corn is protected by subsidies. (although there are some subsidies for sugar as well).

So the effect is that government intervention causes sugar prices to go up and corn prices to go down. Thus, there is government interference on both sides of the equation.

I consider corn subsidies more problematic, because they come directly from taxpayer money, while the costs of sugar tariffs are more roundabout (i.e., they result in higher market cost of sugar, but are not taken from my tax dollars, thus one can avoid the cost by eating less sugar). Also from my limited research it seems that corn subsidies are much more costly than all the cost of sugar price support.
The source for your last sentence: http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2009/08/bait-and-sw...

>"The single most damaging phenomenon to the witness of Christianity in America today is the collective behavior of the Sunday morning lunch crowd. Never has a more well-dressed, entitled, dismissive, haughty or cheap collection of Christians been seen on the face of the earth.

I exaggerate of course. [...]"

I find this quite interesting as whenever I've been out with Christians they've always seemed well behaved, inhibited from complaining even about bad service and terrible food and overgenerous in their tips; my wife for example. But we're in the UK.

Observer bias is highly likely.
"we need to measure differential inputs" suggests he's not at home hobbying. Maybe he's too busy to look at it, or doesn't have the right paperwork to certify a repaired one, who knows.

Apart from you, that is, who jumps straight to "he seems to have more money than me therefore he must be lazy and stupid". Maybe $2k isn't a lot of money to him and he has plenty of brains and you're just judging him by your different-but-not-more-correct standards?
obligatory link to set right the NASA pen thing http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
>Instead I'm proposing an arbitrage that works one layer up -- on top of S3.

Is transfer from s3 to ec2 free? in which case, that might work. Otherwise you'd get eaten alive by bandwidth charges between s3 and your compression/uncompression box.

>I wouldn't want to compete with Amazon S3. Data safety and uptime would keep me up at night like a mofo. I just wouldn't want to run that company, though I can imagine folks like MS doing it.

If you are storing data compressed in your special way on s3, you have the same problems. using non-ecc ram (or ecc ram configured to not crash when bad) and have bad ram on one of your compression boxes? data is corrupted. gone. compression boxes go down? you now have your dreaded uptime issues. Of course, if there is some bug in your compression/deduplication/whatever software, again, you have data loss.

I have personally lost much money and reputation trying to make my disk system 'better' by adding complexity and flexibility. After that pain, I now just try to keep the data as simple as possible (mirrors, and stripes of mirrors) I haven't had data loss since I abandoned my SAN. Complexity == admin error == data loss. In a reasonably designed hardware system, data loss is pretty rare without admin error.

>I do think there are pieces of cloud storage that will not be commoditized, most notably the peace of mind around data safety and uptime. I wouldn't want to use a small cloud storage provider. Thus: (a) they will be able to charge a premium for a long time, and (b) there will be a smallish number of providers, meaning marketing will be less important in the future than having a good product.

If s3 costs keep going down 15% a year (and hard drive costs keep going down 50% a year) s3 will very shortly become a 'premium' provider. While yes, there is room for premium providers, it will be a whole lot cheaper for anyone with significant storage needs to run their own stuff (or to go with a smaller player)

I mean, paying premium prices makes sense sometimes, but not all the time. If you are speaking of premium markets, really, I'm the wrong guy to ask; I'm way over on the other end of the spectrum.

edit: added more "simple is better"
No, but the sheer amount of junior developers who asked questions there over the last 10 years guaranteed that every possible way to incorrectly phrase a question is already answered.

SO is - better open model, better interface, but lacks volume especially in some areas, and lacks trolling-question controls (i.e. "which language is better" type of million-answer threads). But it will mature, I find it interesting enough to contribute.
A better basis for morality is this:

It's immoral to live in a non-error-correcting way because doing so dooms you to repeat your mistakes (whatever they may be) indefinitely.
Heh, no I didn't. I remember someone making that claim on HN but it sure wasn't me :)
There is some historical precedence. However, I'm not sure if we have any precedent for what is happening in engineering. Medical, MBA, and even law schools do admit international students, of course, and engineering graduate programs should too. Our schools would be much weaker if we limited ourselves to US born students, and the experience of all students would be poorer for it. But the percentage of US born students has dropped so severely in graduate engineering programs that I think we're in uncharted and dangerous waters here.

When I was a grad student in engineering at Berkeley (about a decade ago now), I become accustomed to being the only person who grew up in the US in class, study groups, and so forth. For the reasons I described above, I think this is a dangerous situation for the US. In fact, I actually think that our graduate engineering schools (this is based on my limited experience at Berkeley) are starting to assume a European or Asian type of undergraduate preparation, where students tend to specialize earlier, than an American one, where we do more general education and specialize later. While I actually think that Americans from top undergraduate colleges are very well educated, they probably aren't at the same point in their particular branch of study as international students who have studied their subjects more exclusively as undergraduates, so we may soon be at a point where the structure of US graduate education in engineering is less accessible to people who have come up through our own education system.

By analogy, supposed you majored in English and went to law school, having never taken a law class. That's how it works in the US. Now imagine if 95% of your classmates spent the last 4 years at Oxford studying common law, including substantial amounts of study of the US legal system. Well, you'd struggle no matter how wonderful an undergrad student you'd been. I think this structural shift is well underway in US based graduate engineering programs.

Interestingly, US students do enroll in undergraduate engineering programs, because those degrees pay. They just tend to avoid graduate programs in favor of law, business, and medicine - and if you look at the numbers, it's hard to conclude that this is not a highly rational decision.
Sadly Google seems to have dumped SearchWiki. I noticed last week that the "X" button (which removed a particular page from the resultset) is no longer there. You can only upvote, not downvote ... which is stupid. I used the "X"-to-remove far more (generally to remove spammy SEO garbage) than I used the upvote box.

Unless it was being gamed by the SEO crowd, I can't understand why Google killed that feature ... it was the best thing they'd added to the core Web Search in a long time, and was a big step towards a sort of Customized Search which I've always thought could be Google's killer app. With all the information they have about accountholders, it would make sense to customize results depending on who's searching. For some reason they seem to be opposed to per-user customization of results, though.
I may not be old, but I still find your blatant ageism disturbing (I would say only slightly disturbing, except that you've taken this offensive viewpoint to something of an extreme-- so it's not slight at all). "Old people" can be just as hip, modern, and trendy as the rest. Sure, it doesn't fit the stereotype-- maybe it doesn't even fit the trends (I wouldn't know)-- but they can be. Not hiring people just because they're old is illegal and immoral (at least as much as discriminating on any blanket classification is, such as race, gender, religion, etc.).
This is Trevor Blackwell we're talking about. Perhaps you should be careful before casting aspersions.
http://tlb.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Blackwell

Ad-hominem attacks are not the kind of thing Hacker News is about. Please keep that in mind.
It hopefully won't matter. I'm on the mainland, and my gmail, igoogle (now re-directed to google.hk), and google translate are up.

News and search have been surgically removed.

edit: search is up? down? wtf? Whatever, I can use yahoo.
people focus on edge cases because when you start with different common cases and extrapolate them, they contradict each other. the edges cases illustrate the contradictions, but they are firmly rooted in common situations - if they weren't, why bother with them?

for example, it's common to ask whether someone would divert a train onto another line, knowing it would kill someone, to save some larger number of people. that's interesting because two heuristics we use in common cases are (i) avoid doing something that would harm another and (ii) minimise the amount of suffering.

in that case it's not that anyone thinks it's particularly useful to discuss trains because trains are such fascinating things in themselves. instead, it's an interesting case precisely because it shows how starting from two common rules can give contradicting answers.
I am pretty Sure Sam Harris knows his history. I am also pretty sure that it wouldn't be debunked by a good Ethics class.

I also find it quite ironic that you speak of echo chambers. This is exactly how I see Ethics.

Ethics is interpretation of phenomena it's not something that exist "out there" it's not something you can study as anything but history IMHO.

It's not in a one to one relationship with what is "really" going on. Just as Love, Hate and so many other human constructs.
I've noticed an interesting internet trend over the years.

1) I spent several hundred hours chasing down some topic I like, such as ethics, philosophy of science, global warming, The Crusades, whatever

2) Joe Blow the famous internet guy gets a bug stuck in his butt about the same topic -- perhaps he saw it on Oprah or read it on a discarded cocktail napkin. Who knows.

3) Joe does a TED talk, writes a blog, or some other way tells us his deep thoughts, most of which sound like a spin-off of The Matrix. Very cool. Very shallow. And without any historical context.

Everybody oohs and ahs and talks about how cool Joe is.

I'm not saying that has happened here. I'm not saying that I have some kind of deep insight. God knows I'm Joe to some other schmuck. All I'm saying is that reading blogs or watching videos in which people say trivial things while others applaud is getting a bit tiring. I love everybody participating in a debate! But I wish there was some way to rank the content of the material so I wouldn't have to go over elementary material -- many times arguing with people who don't know better. Talk about a waste of time for everybody.

Some kind of difficulty-rating system for internet material would be really cool. Save us all a lot of time on mis-matched conversations.
My understanding of the research to date was that corn syrup was not worse than the equivalent sweetness or caloric value of sugar. (the reason for the fructose ratio is precisely to give the same perceived sweetness per calorie). This study either changes that, or is flawed.

That may be a false dichotomy, because I see two flaws in that view: 1) that all calories are created equal, and that the specific way that a given kind of sugar is metabolized does not matter. (It does matter.) 2) That the per-unit sweetness property of HFCS is actually leveraged by the food industry to hold sweetness constant and use proportionally less HFCS. (It looks like they actually tend to use more, because sweetness sells.)

I agree with others that the Robert Lustig video is well worth watching.
1. If your LLC will be doing business (that is, holding itself out to the public) under a different name than its official name, you should probably file an assumed-name certificate in the appropriate office (which varies by state).

2. If you put a copyright notice on your Web pages (a mouseprint copyright notice is normally a good idea for evidentiary purposes, although technically not required under U.S. law), then the copyright notice should use the official name of the LLC, not the site URL.

Usual disclaimers: I'm a lawyer, but not YOUR lawyer, so this isn't legal advice, don't rely on it as such, don't disclose anything confidential in the comments (lest you waive any privilege that might apply), you and I aren't establishing an attorney-client relationship via this thread, etc., etc.
Not sure why you got downvoted - I would say the comparison is apt. I've seen some disturbing things on Xiaonei, things like a map of the USA with a gigantic PRC flag sticking out of it, and other bits of aggressive nationalistic posturing.
It looks good to me.

<div id="aad-footer-time"><span id="aad-footer-copy">&copy;2010 Google</span>
OK, funny - but they spend money on painting over the posters. Seems to me simply raising the fines would have been more effective, and better for city finances.
"such as the recent finding that people in the UK who have made their homes more energy-efficient are more likely to turn up their heating or keep it on for longer"

As far as this goes it's likely that people assume that with thermostats and modern heating systems, once the insulation is in, the house can be maintained at a higher temperature or heated longer for a lower cost in fuel/money.

After all why insulate your home if you can't make it warmer?

That's like people buying jumpers, they wear them, they don't put them away so that they never need to buy a new one.

Generally speaking consumers have no direct information as to how much heating fuel is being used and what the cost is. Heating costs fluctuate so much and have risen rapidly, any increase after insulation installation would be assumed to be increasing fuel costs.

In short, I don't think this fits the general model.
Cleaning the barnacles from the S.S. Copyright
if ethics is a historical, social construct, then it seems reasonable to me that exploring the current consensus would involve something very like an echo chamber.
F*ck Google Analytics
You're thinking of trademarks, not copyright.
The Mozilla people already stated there is no technical reason they are not supporting H.264. It is idealogical. They are well aware that they could make it pluggable or use the system codecs, they just don't want to.
Taubes explains this (sort of) by explaining that fructose goes straight to the liver, thus not contributing to glycemic index, but doing something to the liver related to insulin to make fat cells more likely to uptake the glucose in the blood. The science isn't fully understood, but it is definitely testable.
the problem is finding someone to fine and proving they did it (see tptacek's comment on false poster on acts he hates).
There is still some protection, though. If I were a patent troll and found some patents that might be applicable to h264, it might be a better idea to sign up with MPEG LA and get a cut of the existing pie than to go after MS or Apple for a bigger slice.
Also, leaving your business at the mercy of someone else's future patent licensing whims is not a very good business decision.

This is an hard pill to swallow for companies who have profited greatly from the interoperability that such licensing affords them.

it is not acceptable to basically bar open source from a huge part of the web

Who exactly is doing that? H.264 is not proposed to be part of the HTML5 spec. It's just what people use.

flash is not part of the standard web ecosystem

In the sense of de jure standards, neither is H.264.
In the sense of de facto standards, it is even more of a standard than H.264.
I think a while back that was under consideration, but the spec-writers gave up since they knew that no matter what codec they picked, they knew they couldn’t get all browser vendors to implement it.
I'd like to think users with large data sets are already deduping and/or compressing their data. Of course, the users still win by eating into the margins of the company performing the arbitrage.

Deduping and compression at a higher level may be easier though less efficient. I had built a prototype mail system using a twisted POP server, qpsmtpd, and S3 as a mail store that deduped and compressed email bodies.
If you get a serious condition in your 20s, that's what you should be covered by with cat- insurance.

If everyone needs "hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lifetime" they are getting too much healthcare. That's my other point - we sink all the money into more-or-less useless operations on old people who are about to kick the bucket.

Healthcare is best directed towards younger people, where it can make a difference. Old people often get stuff that's likely to be net negative (side effects, complications, etc) because the hospitals want to make money off the procedures.
comments like that will earn you karma here, but have quite the opposite effect in real life :)
current consensus being?
>> What gives you the idea that people with such potential would apply at RethinkDB?

> Because they already have.

So how much of the company do they own? I ask because I have noticed that people with the combination of talent, experience and work ethic you are looking for are rarely content to be just someone else's employee. They'll either be founders of their own company, or hold a low-employee-number position in someone else's business with plenty of stock options, or work as independent consultants, or otherwise do something where what's in it for them is on a par with what they bring to the table.
I must admit, while the community aspect is neat, I find all these tools for creating color schemes (like “ColorSchemer”) pretty uninspiring. Every one I’ve seen has a pretty artificially inflexible interface, and most are based on device-oriented models of color, rather than anything based on (these days quite advanced) scientific understanding of human color perception; basically, they ignore most everything that color scientists have learned in the last century of research. Few seem to have any particularly insightful or interesting interface ideas either. Adobe’s Kuler is kind of neat, but it too fetishizes these nearly completely arbitrary (w/r/t perception) relations, in its definitions of various color scheme “types”.

Alas.
my first thought is 'how is this different from kickstarter?'

I mean, my knowledge of both this startup and kickstarter is pretty thin, and there is certainly nothing wrong with competing with something similar.
I see the good ole' question-mark diamond. I see the same thing when I view-source.

Changing my text encoding to latin-1 fixed the display.

I'm on Chrome, amusingly enough, on OS X 10.6.
There are visas other than H-1B.

And, Google just needs to get the people out of Mainland China. If their safety is in danger for actions that they had no control over, I'm sure some country will give them asylum.

Or maybe China realizes that it lost, and will model the rest of the country after Hong Kong. (Remember, Hong Kong is technically mainland China.)
It's funny that you mention Ayn Rand, because (to be perfectly blunt) she's kind of a watered down Nietzsche. And the Sith in Knights of the Old Republic (the sequel to which chops was quoting) were very Nietzschean.
both successes and failures don't only have one cause.
so the employer is being irrational? how are they not punished by market forces? I mean, it seems like an opportunity for arbitrage to me.