skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed. In fact, Buffet and Gates often play bridge together, both online and IRL.
I ran a benchmark on a library i'm working on (fuzzy auto complete), and rubinius was the fastest (I didn't test 1.9).

The code is pure ruby, it creates a decent sized trie then walks it once to set data in each node (a sequential forward index, etc).

I'll release the code once my library is ready for public consumption, but the numbers were (in seconds):

rubinius
~ 4.85

jruby 1.5
~ 5.45

mri 1.8.7
~ 9.35

ree 1.8.7
~ 9.35

and Yes, I did a warm up.
It can't be a good sign for this deal that the details were leaked.
Basketball. Recently purchased a rower and started rowing after I broke my foot playing basketball.
I don't trust Facebook but to be honest I trust sensationalist Hollywood dramatizations even less.
Have you experienced law enforcement and courts in China? I have on several occasions. As well as the U.S.. I lived in Shanghai 10 years. I'm in the U.S. right now with my Chinese wife. My experiences in Shanghai court and with Shanghai police were more fair and congenial than in the U.S. My wife and I were at the county courthouse (U.S.) a week ago and we talked a bit about the flow of a court proceeding. Somewhere in the middle of my description she stopped me and said "You mean the judge takes the word of the police with no hard evidence over the word of the defendant?". Even further, in the U.S., the police usually make some sort of determination of what happened or who is at fault in disputes. This bias carries over into legal proceedings. Not so in Shanghai. The police only take witness reports exactly as stated and provide notarization and copies of the reports to the parties.

Running an Internet business in China is not impossible. I ran and helped others run them for 10 years. The Internet censoring can be a problem at times but is not a top factor in your success or failure as a business.
Metropolitan. I can't really say why, but it gives me a feeling of hope in it's quiet way. Also Ghost Dog and Garden State.
Far from it, amazing complexity in how certain parts of the page load and certain page changes are coming through ajax. Very much a web app, probably as complex as any web app out there.
Scalia is not my favorite person, but that last line cracked me up.
Have you considered the welfare state itself and not tech may be responsible? I would hire someone to do all my household chores but the modern welfare state here in San Francisco makes that prohibitively expensive at my income level, and simultaneously has a very high opportunity cost for the person I would employ if they are collecting welfare benefits such as unemployment.
For a great story exploring the ramifications of this, see: The Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut
Ruby has had a GC since the start; it's a conservative stop-the-world all-or-nothing non-compacting mark-and-sweep garbage collector. Meaning:

1. It can't tell the difference between a number on the heap that happens to look like a reference to some active data, and an actual reference to some active data. Hence it has to be conservative, and assume anything that looks like a reference, is one. Rubinius has a precise GC, and so doesn't suffer from this problem, which can lead to dead objects never being collected.

2. The GC has to stop the VM while it's running. This is probably also the case with Rubinius, however:

3. It has to walk over every object in the VM in one go, so it gets progressively slower the more objects you have. Rubinius has a generational GC, where objects are split into pools based on how long they've been alive for, and these can be scanned individually and at different rates appropriate to their age (i.e. long-lived objects probably aren't worth checking very often).

4. It can't move objects around; when it frees something, it leaves a gap where the object used to be. If a new object doesn't fit there, it has to go somewhere else, wasting that space. In the long run this can lead to memory fragmentation. Rubinius has a compacting GC, allowing it to fill in these holes and make better use of memory, and also better use of CPU caches.

Yes, 1.9 compiles to bytecode, and yes in theory a JIT could be added to it, but that's a pretty big project.
I wonder what solution they are thinking off. Using robots to put a giant containment chamber in place already seems pretty innovative to me.
I'm reminded of a scene from The Good Shepherd:

Joseph Palmi (Joe Pesci): Let me ask you something... we Italians, we got our families, and we got the church; the Irish, they have the homeland, Jews their tradition; even the niggers, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Wilson, what do you have?

Edward Wilson (Matt Damon): The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.

For me that exchange captures a lot of both the good and the bad of the old WASP establishment. On the one hand, it perfectly illustrates the "prejudice and insularity" that have led to its decline. On the other hand, it shows what we have lost - an aristocratic leadership class who really believed in the "noble lie" as understood by Plato. Our elites these days only seem to be in it for themselves and their transnational friends.
Ooooh! My wife (trained as a chemist) gets upset when I equate information entropy and thermodynamic entropy. I can't wait to antagonize her with this.
How have unemployment benefits varied across time?
Media pricing is currently pathological. Even for printed books the cost of production is relatively minor compared to the total price, and the artists tend to take away a relatively small portion of total revenue.

If a book costs 10x as much to produce or has 1/100th the sales as another book that has almost no effect on the overall pricing.

Unfortunately, consumers now expect books (and CDs and movies) to have flat, wholesale-style pricing. As if they were a commodity. Worse yet we have this bizarre hard back / paper back staged release process for books used to extract profit for in demand books. A model which doesn't work at all for ebooks.

I don't know what the answer is and I suspect that consumers may be too inflexible, at least in the near term, to allow for much price variability on ebooks. If that's the case then we may end up in a very bad situation for authors and new literature in general for a very long time.
There doesn't appear to be anything in that poll preventing multiple votes from the same person at the same time.
I think it could be related to drought conditions (or, perhaps flooding) where the hay harvest failed. Google "hay drought midwest south" etc and you will see that hay has gone both ways a few times over the past decades. A list for farmers/others to share info about supply / demand is at http://www.haylist.umn.edu/
PR takes the perseverance of the crow
One of the reasons immigration is such a tough issue is that illegal immigrants are by and large good, hard-working people who are willing to work at less than minimum wage and without benefits.

So you got 5 million of these guys, all working in some kind of quasi-invisible status. Meanwhile the guy that runs the local business runs into all sorts of complexity when trying to hire a "regular" employee.

As the disparity continues to grow between the minimum amount that businesses must provide and the ability of undocumented workers to provide cheap labor, unemployment will probably trend up. (Just pulling that conclusion out of my ass, but it tracks with what I am seeing as I travel and talk to people running businesses)

I should note, this is a vicious cycle. There is a feedback loop
Isn't it nice when you not only understand what an article is about from the headline, but also get all the necessary information from it alone? Short and to the point.
Ignore Everybody
In the summer during the day, I play beach volleyball a few times a week at Milwaukee's Bradford Beach. Great workout, great fun, and something completely different to hone and perfect.

At night, and in the winter, I play videogames: Quake Live is a great game to play for 10-30 minute sessions. League of Legends, and now Bloodline Champions is fun to play with a few friends.
Sorry for not noticing your reply sooner!

Actually the one who invited me and "caused" me to join was someone I didn't really know, but met once at an event. This person was extremely unlikely to be friends with any of my real friends.

But still, I got suggestions for my actual friends right away, so I still can't see any other way than for Facebook to actually have had access to my GMail account prior to me joining.
Not that I disagree, but "inability to respect social norms" is basically part of the definition of Borderline Personality disorder or Narcissism, so saying as much is basically tautological.
Hmm 2 nuclear bomb people, an astrophysicist, a space mining expert, and a maverick.

They are planning to divert an asteroid and crash it into the leak.
It sounds like you are quite enamored with U.S. justice. I'm guessing you've never been arrested and put through the system.

From this post, you are indicating that if the law is published and clear, then its ok? I've found it very easy to understand Chinese laws. What's your point?

Perhaps some web sites are being blocked as a competitive measure. Are you saying a country and government must engage in free and open trade? What if they choose to play the international trade game different?
Alright, I can imagine dental care being expensive in America. I suppose that side is run by the insurance companies too?
That's snarky and ignorant. I've lived in Shanghai for 10 years. The Internet blocking never effected my ability to deliver quality IT solutions to my customers.
You're basically saying "it's worked itself out in the past so it will surely do so in the future." But that's not a logical conclusion.

It certainly can be. Daniel is basically arguing for the outside view, and the outside view is often the best predictor of outcomes. Now, it may be that this time is different, but when you have a long history of specific failed predictions based on the details of a transition, it's certainly worth paying attention to the trend as a guide to this instance.
It is also a change from the Facebook/Steve jobs reply/ipad articles.
It's not just the cost of production for me, but also that when I buy an ebook I am decreasing the supply of that book in the used book market. This should cause used versions to be priced more highly, and increase the probability that someone will buy a new book from the publisher.
Is Redis a noSQL db, a cache, or a messaging server?
Ask HN - SEO Advice
I was thinking about making some videos just as something creative to do. I don't even have a topic in mind. I thought I would let the market decide.

I know that SEOMoz has a Keyword Difficulty Tool that shows if you are writing a blog or something how competitive the market is for the topic you are writing about. Is there something similar for Videos, images, or mobile content? Seems like a very useful thing to have. I can't believe I'm the first one needing this.

EDIT: To better describe the question, let's say I want to post pictures of my German Shepherd on my blog. Is there a tool I can use that will tell me how hard it is to place that picture on the first page of search results from Google? Same thing for videos or mobile content. I've got that tool for text content -- it's SEOMoz Keyword Difficulty Tool.
The fact that it was ruled un-constitutional does not take away the fact that this law was in effect for several years.

And it's not the only example of such a law, and not all of them have been ruled un-constitutional.

I don't know what you mean with 'intellectually dishonest', all I'm trying to do is to point out that there is plenty wrong in China but we in the so-called 'free west' have enough beams in our own eyes to preclude us from going all 'oh my' about China without qualifications.

The anti-China sentiment here seems to be for the most part based on media and fear of the unknown rather than on solid facts, and you could make exactly the same case about the US and various other 'free' countries.

I'm all for criticizing human rights violations, but then let's be fair and even handed about it, instead of suggesting that a simple request could get you in trouble with the law in China, which as far as I know from those that I know that live and work in China is simply not true.

I also note that I was the one to step up and actually do something about this particular problem in this particular instance.
You simply need someone to give you SSH access to a server outside China. Setup a SOCKS proxy through SSH and you can get anywhere you want.

Using some SaaS from inside China can be a problem (even with your SSH tunnel) due to latency and bandwidth. Find other tools. Folks have been building Internet companies for quite some time without needing cool JavaScript SaaS collaborative cloud thingies.
It would seem farther.
"every major HTML5 app today is built using un read able markup"

Ignoring Scribd specifically for a moment, why do people insist that applications be built using technologies and best practices designed for documents? These are two very different things. For many applications it makes little sense to try to shoehorn the user interface into semantically "correct" markup.

However it often absolutely does make sense to render the documents created with these applications in clean markup.

That said, Scribd is fundamentally an application centered around displaying documents, so it would be nice if they were able to render documents in clean way. But given the nature of PDF, as the author alludes to, this is difficult if not impossible, so you can't really fault Scribd for that. Despite this (which is no worse and arguably much better than the Flash equivalent), there are other benefits to using HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
There you go again, injecting reason in to an otherwise entertaining argument not hindered by facts and figures.

The 'red scare' seems to be alive and well.
Unfortunately, Django 1.2 has much more to learn from Symfony and Doctrine.
One of the defining qualities of a Startup is that it's small. The implication there is that everybody on the team needs to be running at full speed right out of the gate, and if anybody is not pulling their weight the entire venture will probably fail.

I don't see where training would fit into a team like that. It seems that there is no room in a startup for employees that need training to do their job. Nor is there much in the way of slack time to train people to do things that aren't their core.
He did, in his dreams. However, reality slapped him in the face and he hopefully woke up.

Now i'm not so much interested in what he/facebook has done, but what they will be doing - I think this matters most. My thoughts are that they will still be heading in the same direction with the same plan, but just less transparent about it.
'decides they need a particular thing'? Can I undecide to need food and water? I would argue that 'needs' are by definition the things you don't have a choice about.
Maybe the public finally realizes all these titans of the tech scene (going back to Gates, Jobs, Ellison, etc) are deep deep down just another bunch of cash-driven assholes like the rest of the business world.

The media got swindled by putting them all on pedestals. (Wired, you're the latest guilty party by putting Zuck next to Gates on the cover).

Time to knock a few down.
Not any more. Clock at the top of all my displays. If I'm not staring at a display doing work, I'm reading on my iPad or iPhone; clocks abound.
Actually, there's evidence (plenty posted on HN) that he's still hitting the snooze button.
Making Sense of Revision-control Systems
lol.. living in China in a year allows me to detect singaporean accent from a mile away~~
I think it's a rule in Hollywood that sports movies must be inspirational. In addition to Any Given Sunday, you've got:

* Invictus
* The Blind Side
* Rudy
* Remember the Titans
* Miracle
* Rocky
* Karate Kid

And that's just a few of the genre.
The Enemy Within: What is Conficker's Botnet For?
Equally they could have chosen to invest in GS ahead of JPM because of this view about one being a casino and the other not.

However, this doesn't answer your original point: what is it about JPM that makes it a casino that doesn't apply to GS?

I'd like to know the answer too. Good question.
In my opinion, web based documents should have certain level of semantic purity. Of course there will be technical difficulties to achieve it, but that is what hackers are for. Right?

While you have the right to justify the lack of semantic markup in Scribd html docs, he has the right to expect a non-messy markup underneath.

Calling someone's expectation "ignorance" isnt very fair.
Would you like to share what you think those things are?
As I recall, OJ was acquitted, so Robert Shapiro did something right.
The system wasn’t changed in any dramatic way, if anything the scope of the welfare state was reduced in the last ten years. I can’t give you a detailed rundown of all the changes in the last fifty years, though.

And as I said, everything considered Germany didn’t become poorer in the last fifty years, rather much richer.
> We were on the edge of something that could have taken civilization as we know it to the edge of ruin.

Banks alone can't take civilization down because they don't produce wealth. As long as there are factories, services, knowledgeable, skilled people doing useful things, the civilization will stand OK with or without the rotten banking system.

Failing banks, on the other hand, might have taken down Berkshire Hathaway, I suppose, but that's not the entire civilization.

> Very high IQ people can be completely useless

... in the eyes of very low IQ people.

> I see no reason to think Goldman misbehaved in some horrible fashion. Everyone was doing it, and it's only natural to increase your moneymaking activities when you can do so legally.

Should I really comment on this nonsense? Goldman was doing what everyone was doing without much thinking about the consequences, and they didn't misbehave? Actually he responds to himself a bit later:

> You have to be able to keep your head on when everyone else is losing theirs.
Quite so, there's no objective measure for good software, other than perhaps sales (and it's enormously difficult to trace sales data back to individual contributions from one out of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of devs).

Which is why software development is still very much a craft. And a pretty esoteric one at that. It often takes the subjective judgment of a known good developer to determine the quality of another developer's contribution. The unfortunate side effect of this is that the really good dev shops (populated by talented devs even in management roles) are working at levels many, many orders of magnitude beyond what the run of the mill dev shops are capable of. There are a great many development projects managed or overseen by non-developers, and many of those people lack the basic skills necessary to tell the difference between gold and utter crap. It's no surprise then that so much "enterprise-y" development is little more than snake oil, VBA scripts and MS access duct taped together and sold for millions of dollars to big companies who don't have the skills to know they got taken for a ride.

Software development is only just barely scratching its way out of its alchemy and astrology phase. There are far more untalented, unskilled hacks out there than there are honest craftsmen.
Thanks for sharing that old article. It had one interesting nugget:

>While Zuckerberg promised that thefacebook.com would boast new features by the end of the week, he said that he did not create the website with the intention of generating revenue.
An Open Letter from Mark Zuckerberg (2006)
Here's some discussion from groklaw back in November when these oral arguments took place:

http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20091109191422...
I didn’t find much data with a quick search, but I found numbers from 1998 to 2007[1].

There is a increase of the average from 671€ to 765€. That’s 94€ in ten years, that can’t possibly be more than inflation (2% inflation comes out to about 10€ per year).

(Those are, by the way, numbers for the short term unemployment benefits, you get those only for a limited time. There are longer term unemployment benefits.)

[1] http://www.sozialpolitik-aktuell.de/tl_files/sozialpolitik-a... [PDF]

– edit: I just decided to do some procrastination and calculate how high the current average unemployment benefit should be, given the inflation between 1998 and 2007. Turns out they should get 770€. So if you factor in inflation the unemployed got on average less in 2007 than in 1998. Not much less, though – I guess there is some regulatory mechanism which adjusts benefits based on inflation. That would explain the close fit.
On Turning The Page
Exactly, and Facebook knows this. Real change will take competition, and competition will take years to grow.
Works for me an hour after you - I hadn't checked in the meantime. Thanks for the confirmation.
Already done. I gave him an account on one of my machines, it's up and running.
Nope.

The cost of producing an ebook is around 90% of the cost of producing a paper book. This only seems counter-intuitive until you realize that 70% of what you pay for a book is slurped down by the retail distribution channel, 10% goes to the author, 10% goes to the publisher, and 10% goes on production costs.

More here:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-h...
fishing, hunting, hiking, biking and making beer.
Been with LiquidWeb for over a year now and their support team is excellent. Just started on their new service, Storm On Demand, but can't really give an opinion yet.
I wouldn't bet on it, if you search "stupid boss" on that facebook status search someone hacked together or on twitter, half of the results are comments about the facebook search site or about facebook privacy. Don't underestimate how quickly it spreads to everyone.
And risk a huge hit to their economy?
The real lesson here? There are no awards for correctness. If the biggest and best webapps use pig-ugly HTML, the rest of us can probably stop worrying. Build it, launch it, bodge it.
I think we should stop tossing money at this problem. That's more than enough until they get something out the door.
How do emulators work and how are they written?
OK, this guy is ragging on what is a good tech demo, but "HTML 5" seems to be the 2010 equivalent of saying "Web 2.0" or "AJAX" when it comes to getting early adopters to check out your stuff, and Scribd threw around the term without it being, hmm.. authentic.. (that is, HTML 5 as a concept means more than merely producing a document that would pass validation)
Oh, this is nothing. You want to be outraged, take a look at the "Intelligent Investor" on Amazon. The kindle edition is 5 DOLLARS more than the printed version. What the what!!!!
One wonders why there are still comments being posted on that.
Sure, but if all of us are walking around with tinfoil hats on, looking over our backs for the men in black suits, all of the time we wouldn't get much done now would we?

Also, once again, the channel hopping is fairly normal for a wifi wardriving setup, feel free to go test this theory on your own, as well as go driving down the road at 25 - 50 Mph and get anything but a few packets of data from the wireless networks you do come across where the owners at the moment you are driving by are using their wireless, and data is being transmitted in clear text.
Thanks, your comment caused me to dust off my 10 speed and take it out for the first time since winter. Man am I out of shape ;)
You can say that, however if you've ever actually been homeless, you'll find that is something quite shocking, and you will find yourself in quite a tiff most likely. Shelter is a pretty basic human need.