skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"You should be able to kill yourself if you really want to, but they won't allow you."

If I own a business. Will I be allowed to not hire anyone that even touches drugs? I feel I should have the right, since those people have the right to "kill themselves".

Also, if we have a government run health care program, regular drug users should either 1) have to pay a large percentage more out of their pockets or 2) shouldn't get covered by a government plan. I shouldn't have to pay for anyone knowingly killing themselves with substances.

"Natural selection? If anybody is dumb enough to damage or kill themselves with the use of drugs it's fine with me. Same goes for cigarrettes."

You might be fine with this, but there are still people to this day that sue the cigarette companies for health bills and other related problems due to their own problems. We will also be exposing a larger percentage of the population to substances that are known to be addictive. This will result in more addicts, which can and will increase health care costs overall. How do you propose we deal with these problems?

You seem to have this idea that when we legalize all drugs, all drug-related violence will stop and we won't have any other problems. It's not as simple or as easy as this.
Last sentence revision: It's something to consider since average thread length on HN has been increasing with its popularity.
I'm trying to learn scheme with the help of SICP. (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/) It's a really good book. Clearly the authors put a lot of work into it. My mind has been expanded a few times, and I'm only just into the 2nd chapter.
This totally cracked me up. It reminded me of this guy I know who wanted a computer to take with him when he visits his lake cabin up north. Laptop you say? No no no. He only wants to use it IN the cabin, where He already has an old monitor, keyboard, and mouse. So he bolts a metal handle to the top of his mini-tower. "This is my portable!" He was so proud.
To understand calculus, not algebra.
Why is it faster?
"Put the Twinkie down and come out with your hands up."

Are you actually trying to compare a twinkie to meth?
I'm spending a good bit of time with play! (http://www.playframework.org). It's Rails for Java, only more.
Csound.
No it doesn't. I used Linux and FreeBSD as my desktop pretty much throughout all of the 1990s. Was Linux ever a "usable" desktop operating system in the '90s?
Taking a Masters in maths with the Open University. Usually have at least one language on the go in evening classes.
I myself am not actually sold on the noSQL movement, at least not on the idea of ditching SQL entirely. It has its place, but may not be the best solution for every problem.

That said, on the authors complaint about having to restart cassandra when doing the equivalent of an alter table: lately every time we do an alter table in MySQL (which takes hours on large tables, during which time you can do nothing with them), when the alter finally finishes, MySQL mysteriously crashes. MySQL may have given more thought to the problem, but their solution obviously has problems too.
Signal processing is fun, and its principals crop up in unexpected ways. Grokking convolutions and auto-corelations is a nice "bump" in the way I think about data processing. Seeing data as a stream instead of discrete chunks sometimes helps a simple convolution be apparent when facing a naive implementation's taxing computation. What this would have to do with security, I don't know.

I think that tptacek's point is that he wants someone that "digs deeper".
...except for being able to go wherever you want, whenever you want.
Oh not, I'll have to wait a few weeks for the next production run and suffer with owning a device that's had the inevitable Object 1.0 hardware fixes!
> In 1999 installing linux was a big console-based adventure full of unknowns and question marks... things today are obviously much, much simpler

Except it wasn't with distros like Mandrake (now mandriva), no matter how much linux haters like to repeat that lie, Linux has been easy to install for the last 10 years. Now try to install OSX on anything else than a Mac, you'll have fun. If you don't want to have installation issues, get a pre-installed machine.
DVCS folks like to say that the real enemies are the people still using Subversion, rather than the competing DVCS tools. What they fail to realize is that DVCS fragmentation a big part of the reason people like me continue using Subversion. If there were a clear DVCS winner, I would have switched years ago.

Fortunately, it looks like git is starting to take the lead in this fight. As a result, I've started moving some of my projects over. From what I've seen, git has the best internals. The absence of explicit deltas in the core database is a particularly brilliant move on git's part. In the long run, I hope that wins out over bzr and hg's slightly better user experience. After all, it's much easier to fix user interface problems than to change a tool's core architecture.
(where iPad is almost useless in most of these cases)

That remains to be seen.
So, how long does it take to identify a verb on a 2.66GHz Core2 MacBook Pro…

FOURCC 4.9ns // The parent comment code
FOURCC-without-alignment-bug 6.1ns // ... safely assemble the word
NGINX 10.3ns // main ariticle's code
STRCMP 17.6ns // most commen verbs first

The FOURCC codes as in the parent only work if you can assume you know the character after the verb to be a space or other known character because GET and PUT are too short. They also require disambiguating code for the 5+ letter verbs but these are all relatively rare (probably).

My strings are all 4 byte aligned, so the FOURCC case may be getting an unfair boost, it never generates an unaligned read which possibly is slower.

Test data is a set of jumbled GET,HEAD,POST,PUT lookups that I made up to meet my idea of a web server.

There are some worst cases hiding out there, for instance all PROPPATCH verbs…

FOURCC 14.7ns
FOURCC-without-alignment-bug 17.7ns
NGINX 19.8ns
STRCMP 37.4ns

Feels like gcc sequentially tests case values. Make sure to put them in the order for common verbs to match first. The FOURCC codes get the most control here. NGINX is most consistent, probably from its two layered lookup nature.

So there you have it: nginx's algorithm is significantly better then strcmp, and fairly independent of verb distribution. A FOURCC lookup is faster, even if made safe for all architectures. And finally, strcmp isn't that bad (freebsd anyway, the GNU libc is about half as fast as seen in further testing).

(I am left with a nagging desire to check a perfect hashing function though.)

Edit: gperf is about 50% slower than the nginx method. No need to go that direction for perfect hashing.
I think it is great that they are caring about the non-technical user. Why should be a kilo = 1024? It is 1000 - everybody knows this. :)
> Are we seriously at the stage where people want "an Apple product"?

Hahaha, way past it. Computers are complex products, and optimizing your purchase when there is variation among 30 different features (ram, CPU, screen size, screen resolution, OS, price, etc etc) is daunting. Shortcuts are taken, one of the most common no doubt being approval from peers.
NVIDIA Drops Their Open-Source Driver, Refers Users To VESA Driver
I try to learn more about design - web/graphical and industrial design
Just like in Ruby, classes and modules are open for modification at any time, so you can add and change methods in existing classes.

Brings to mind the expression "A bug-for-bug port of the existing system."
Depends on the city. In Dallas you'd feel trapped without a car, but in D.C. the metro can get you wherever, whenever.
The opposite happens here, when I switch from Lucid to Vista. Did you try with a 10 year old version of linux? I think XP is 10 years old now.
I'm spending 2 months in the Pyrenees at a farm producing Tomme de Montagne and a variety of smaller sheep's milk cheeses and three months outside of Toulouse producing a variety of blue cheese.
KBR Bills $5 Million For Mechanics Who Work 43 Minutes A Month
I've found that relational ORMs force me to write convoluted and weird code for all but the simplest of joins. Maybe django's ORM is better; I've mostly used SQLAlchemy and a few others.
You think it is updating right now?
Sometimes I think that the iPad is what netbooks should have been.
Are you pining for the days of embedded MIDI files? :)
Freemium Business Model Data Insights from Evernote
You need to be near a WiFi access point...

Correct me if I'm wrong – although I don't think I am - but, isn't the point of wifi that you don't need to stay tethered to a router? And the iPad supports 802.11n, so you'll be able to get a decent range with a pretty cheap router. Definitely enough to cover your house and yard.

The $500 model also has 16GB of storage, and I have no idea if that's a lot or a little. Since 64GB is available I assume 16GB is not much.

The size of a movie won't change if you have a 16 or 64GB iPad. And as with everything else, if its enough space or not depends on what you use it for. Personally, 8GB is more than enough space for me, on my iPod touch (and 16GB on my Pre is excessive for what I need). So, I preordered a 16GB iPad.

The availability of a greater size doesn't change the amount of information a smaller size can hold. 16GB is 16GB, regardless of the existence of a 64GB model. It just that there are different sizes that cost different amounts of money.

Total Price: $1000. Hmm... nice round number, huh?

$670-$700 being rounded up to $1000 is a big jump.
By what standard?

Monetization? Can you show that international traffic monetizes at 25% US?

One of the problems with Fred's sample is that those are all free services. When money is involved you find your populations don't trend like that at all (as Fred should know). Let's ignore that for a moment.

Three of the top four international users of Google are BRIC countries. BRIC has a per capita GDP of about 7% US. At that level they probably monetize well below 7% US. If I have a hard time making ends meet am I going to spend the same proportion of my income on virtual Facebook gifts as you? Now ask yourself, if you run AdWords, do you want to pay the same price for a click that comes from India?

Or perhaps you are suggesting foreign countries matter more because they have more people? Not much of a conversation there.
Good. Fine-grained sound controls are one thing that hold back browser games outside of Flash. If this gets standardized, it'll open a lot of doors.
"Better yet we can tax and treat the addicted."

I don't think we should be using taxes treat the addicted. Drugs are a personal choice. You have to make that choice to first start using drugs. It could be peer pressure or you just wanted to experiment. I would rather see that tax money go for something more beneficial to society.

If we are going to legalize drugs and you make the personal choice to kill yourself, I sure as hell am not going to pay for your treatment.

It's exactly this type of thinking that makes me never want legalized drugs in the US.

How do we know that legalization reduced crime and drug abuse in Portugal? It could have been any number of things.
can we please stop letting these hit the front page until people write reasoned articled free from the obvious bias that makes them resemble playground arguments.
Sorry, just noticed this was a dupe (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1222354)
Looks like adaptive payments are available in my country, I'll check it out, thanks.
It doesn't force you to fit non-tabular (eg. hierarchical) data into a table structure.

Also, no schema means the data structure is more malleable. With the right ORM, this fits in well nicely with polymorphism: I can store objects with some common features in the same collection, but when I retrieve them from the database I get different types of objects which inherit the same base object. mongoengine is one ORM that does this.
You should check out vertexdb. It's designed to be used just like a filesystem, but it fixes the shortcomings of filesystems when they are used as dbs.

http://github.com/stevedekorte/vertexdb

In production use at http://stylous.com
It can be used for reading. I agree.

Writing coursework - do you really want to write more than a couple of lines of text on a device that doesn't have a physical keyboard? (you cannot rest your fingers on the screen without causing "touch") Same argument works for taking notes. I cannot possibly imagine working with a spreadsheet or graphs on the iPad.

Sharing information - you cannot run more than one non-stock application at once. I expect it's hard to share anything in that kind of environment.

Communicating with others - by default you're left with IM. Unless you buy an additional Apple-approved camera (cheapest laptops include webcams these days).

Doing any proper research - that needs at least a browser and text editor running at the same time. (unless you take notes on paper)

There are additional keyboards of course, cameras, etc. but why bother? Any half-decent netbook is much better suited for learning purposes than iPad. I can understand not being able to spend $6k on a laptop. Not sure what the situation is like in US, but in UK you can get both 3G dongle and laptop on a 2 year contract for £35/mth. That's just above $1k spread over 2 years (with internet included). Are we talking about education, or are we talking about expensive toys?
ESR's deeper point is still valid. Take away Linux and Linus and what remains is that you should not try to tackle problems with genius alone.

His point, BTW, was valid since well before Linux was born. Or Linus, or ESR.
Does such an article exist? I actually prefer these debates because they don't pretend to be unbiased. They put their cards on the table.

If someone seems unbiased it just means it hid the bias well, but achieved the same result.
Except Georgetown. D.C. public transportation is sometimes pretty crappy.
Here's the thing. They don't put their cards on the table. They just bicker, going tit for tat on every little argument. There is far too little science being discussed.
If, as I claim, it's a bad career, shouldn't those discriminating against women in university STEM careers be praised instead of condemned ^_^? The sooner someone bails out, the better, if this thesis is correct.

(I.e. it would be a lot more productive if you were to address my point instead of totally ignoring it.)
Game Table: Classic board games for the Apple iPad
I was always good in the sciences, especially physics, and also in music. My teachers seemed to think I was smart, but they definitely thought I would never get maths.
Couldn't agree more.

We need case studies and proposed solutions from both camps, putting them to real tests.
Thomas Barnett draws a new map for peace
Yes, yes, YES! I loathe the 1024-byte kilobyte.
Good stuff: memory management dot org
There's a dock for that.™ The problem with tablets is you always wind up yearning for the things you get with a laptop and it seems apparent the solution is dongles galore. I guess it's great for the peripheral market.
So what about other architectures? How about a 1.6GHz Atom 330 processor. This doesn't have out of order execution and should more closely match ARM and MIPS type small machines. (Sorry, I can't get one of those booted from where I am now.)

FOURCC 23.3ns
FOURCC-without-alignment-bug 27.6ns
NGINX 29.8ns
STRCMP 70.5ns (glibc)

The difference between FOURCC and NGINX is vanishing here.

How about a 3GHz core-i7 840

FOURCC 4.8ns
FOURCC-without-alignment-bug 5.6ns
NGINX 8.3ns
STRCMP 13.9ns (freebsd)

Not a lot faster than a Core-2, but some. Of course it has twice the cores plus hyperthreading ready to go.

How about if you are cheap (like me) and got a 2.93GHz core i3 for your server:

FOURCC 5.3ns
FOURCC-without-alignment-bug 5.8ns
NGINX 9.9ns
STRCMP 33.6ns (glibc)

Not bad for the little guy. (Saved $100 on the cpu, plus didn't need to add a video card with some goofey driver, and its system wide low power state is almost as good at the Atom's.)
"I've never hired someone who knew Rails."

Looks like you will soon. :)

"We're hiring a Rails/jQ developer. NYC or Chicago."
that needs at least a browser and text editor running at the same time

App idea: split pane browser/text editor. Automagically associate notes as they are written with the open web page. Bonus points: saving local copies of PDF's viewed with reference metadata.

Your other points are weaker - for long-form text, you can buy a hardware keyboard; not sure what sharing issues you have, I'm sure copy paste and email work; communicating with others - your phone still works even when you buy an iPad.
True, but if you were ever under the impression that you were buying Kindle books instead of renting them you weren't paying attention. As of yet, the doctrine of first sale just does not apply.

And that makes sense given the architecture: even if your Kindle could hold every book you "bought", the system still protects you against loss or destruction of that device (or it's inevitable eventual replacement). Given that, the legal liability of Amazon changes a whole lot from the old world where they had no responsibility after shipping it to you.
We've had a Rails product for something like 3 years now. Everyone is expected to write in Rails. I'm not so much expecting them to come in the doors knowing it.
KB does exist, it's a Kelvin-byte.
> Something more than a quibble: while the EU has a higher total GDP, that doesn't translate into a higher purchasing power or standard of living---which can get complicated.

In terms of GDP and purchasing power parity, then Wikipedia says:

* US GDP (PPP) = $14.26 Trillion (2009) [1]

* EU GDP (PPP) = $15.26 Trillion (2008) [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union
Ha! A while ago I suggested on Twitter that the solution to iPad's lack of multitasking is buying multiple iPads, but people thought I was joking. Maybe it wasn't such a bad Idea after all. :)
App doesn't exist in the standard browser. A custom app would probably conflict with the existing functionality of a browser (not allowed/not approved). Users will not be able to open other students' notes (.doc / .docx)

About the keyboard itself - if you have to carry your keyboard to a meeting with other people just to take notes quickly, I think what you need is a laptop/netbook really. (you also need a stand for the screen itself since you cannot hold them both)
They're not talking about "outside of work".
counterpoint: learning to drive before going to uni was the best investment I made.
If they allowed him to enroll in this field of study but are now limiting his access to the curriculum, they should have just refused his tuition. That's the legal obligation.

Did you read the article? She offered to sign an explicit legal waiver and accompany him on the trip at her own expense?

It appears they family is willing to go to extraordinary lengths to compromise. If the university would look to "solve" the problem vs. outright denial - the family would probably pay cost of any "additional insurance" rider.
Go (the language, the game is interesting but I know I will never be good at it ;)
The Apple //c was pretty much made for that purpose, though it seems that with the advent of affordable real laptops, nobody makes the luggable-with-a-handle form factor anymore.
Compared to OS X or Windows, I'd say Ubuntu gets a lot of details wrong. The window button positioning was a recent example, but it's by no means the first. Below are some bugs that I have experienced while using 9.10 or 10.04 beta. I also noted the year they were filed.

Lots of redundant fonts: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/18666 (2005)

Copy-pasting text is broken in some apps. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/11334 (late 2004)

No way to auto-arrange desktop icons. https://bugs.launchpad.net/nautilus/+bug/20284 (2005, https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1260... is related)

No ability to change individual screensaver settings. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-screensaver/... (2005)

Can't read some DVDs without using sudo/root. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/util-linux/+bug/10... (late 2004)

Setting volume to 0 doesn't mute speakers. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/16454 (2005)

Ubuntu is improving (9.10 finally fixed a bunch of problems with Intel graphics), but the user experience details are definitely a weak spot. Considering how old these bugs are, I don't expect the situation to improve any time soon.
Switching back and forth between Mongo and SQL is not without technical cost. The syntax and semantics are quite different and translating complex queries to map/reduce is also a problem.
Apparently, that's what Steve Jobs thinks too.
Is he seriously at the stage where he thinks laptops cost $6,000? Even Apple won't hit you that hard.
Go follows quite closely in the spirit of C, and doesn't try to protect you from yourself (but also doesn't give you complexity just for the purpose of helping you hang yourself coughc++cough.
You're just making stuff up. There are tons of alternative 'browsers' using the webkit view on the iPhone, so that won't be a proble.

You can already read .doc documents on the iPhone. Not sure about Pages on the iPad, but it might be able to import and edit them.

I'm not saying that the iPad would be ideal for a student. But you shouldn't make up arguments.
I think Apple gets some benefit of the doubt because of how they've gone back and forth, and produced enough cool things that they get some geek cred.

The mystique of the Woz days, getting full specs for an Apple I along with the machine, etc., probably has considerable lingering impact on techies considering Apple a fellow techie company, as opposed to an Evil Corporate Behemoth.

Subsequent Apple II and pre-OSX Mac stuff was pretty closed, but at least balanced that a bit with relatively vibrant 3rd-party software development, so lots of us have good memories of educational games we played on an Apple II or Mac in school, while the PC was just for Lotus or whatever.

And OSX of course is quite open for a mainstream desktop OS. The sub-GUI part of the base OS is open as Darwin, and even the closed-source full thing is relatively tinkerable--- comes with gcc/python, allows for things like DarwinPorts to be built on top of it, etc.
You can skip the article and just read this sentence:

"Digg solved their very real I/O issue by essentially pre-caching every possible query result for a targeted need."
I'm pretty sure Europe monetizes similarly, if not slightly better than US traffic FWIW.
"Did you know that Cassandra requires a restart when you change the column family definition? Yeah, the MySQL developers actually had to think out how ALTER TABLE works, but according to Cassandra, that's a hard problem that has very little business value. Right."

Really did the MySQL people think about it? because it takes ages to do an ALTER. Even when you are doing something like dropping an index it can lock up for hours, where no one can do any inserts. In contrast restarting a service is no big deal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSELOCMmw4A
I reserved two -- the first being a 16 and then I thought maybe I'd like a 32, so I reserved that last night -- I'm only getting one, so someone will be lucky.

Its wild though, the 32 is about 635 with tax + 43 for a case + 76 for apple car, that is a good 750 for the thing.
I recorded a list of issues that may prevent you from using Cassandra as a general purpose website storage right now.

http://www.codexon.com/posts/is-cassandra-ready-yet

It appears as though Ted's complaint about needing to restart Cassandra to modify ColumnFamilies (tables) is nearly obselete. A patch for the last remaining subtask has been submitted.
It makes complete sense to me—remember the scenes in Star Trek where someone is sitting at a desk absolutely covered in PADDs, each doing one little thing? We just need to wait for the price to come down :)