skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Prometheus is a truly complex character, with a well thought out story - unlike any in the Abrahamic religions.

To understand Prometheus, you have to understand his gift - foresight. He could see the future. In the battle between the Titans (which he was) and the Olympians, he saw that his kind would lose to their own children, so he 'joined' them.

His acts of defiance to Zeus weren't acts of rebellion, they were acts of guerilla warfare. Prometheus took fire, the one thing that truly kept man apart from the gods (IE the ability to change our environment at will), and he didn't just give it to mankind like the myth states, he gave it to his own children - many of which were also Zeus' offspring, and mankind as a whole was allegedly Zeus' greatest love.

Prometheus as it were saw the cycle of the universe. Cronus had usurped Uranus. Zeus had usurped Cronus, and Prometheus did everything in his power to ensure humans usurped Zeus.

As you pointed out, there is his act of stealing fire. However, one of his greater feats (which caused him the need to steal fire) was when an agreement was to be struck between the mortals and the immortals. Prometheus had man wrap beef within the cows stomach as one sacrifice and bones wrapped within glistening fat as another. Zeus chose the latter, setting a precedent for all sacrifices. When man started burning (IE sending to the gods) the junk parts of the animals, Zeus was pissed and took fire from mankind. Then Prometheus stole it back, and got chained to the rock.

However, again if you look at the bigger picture, Prometheus was never disadvantaged. He lifted mankind from the burden of sacrifice, he again gave fire to mankind, which landed him in eternal torture. However, Prometheus has illustrated several times that his foresight far out performs Zeus' omniscience. For him, eternal torture wasn't eternal, he knew Heracles (AKA Hercules) would be along shortly to free him. Prometheus eventually reconciles with Zeus by warning him that he's going to be usurped, and forms a sort of power-sharing agreement if he helps protect Zeus from being overthrown. It also, allegedly, led to the release of the other Titans from imprisonment.

So the real question here is, was Zeus ever going to be usurped in the first place? It essentially went from the Titans being overthrown, Prometheus waging a guerilla war and eventually forming a coalition government between the Titans and Olympians.

I've said this before to people when discussing this, but where in the hell was the imagination in the Abrahamic religions? Prometheus, a singular character in the Ancient Greek religion has a story in such a scope that it would kick LotR's ass, and still be 3-times longer . . . from what we, thousands of years later, have pieced together.
Simply put, the market sees more growth in Apple than they do in Microsoft. Microsoft has been trying to grow for a while now, which since they own such as large share of the OS/Office market, means expanding into new markets.

They have had some success with xbox, but overall they are yet to be in the black there. There is still a chance to grow with the online services. If they can get the xbox positioned as a general entertainment devices in enough peoples homes, but it may be too expensive for that. You have google coming into this space now, and they are going to do things very cheap.

Zune hasn't worked out for them.

They lost there way with Windows Mobile, it seems they just forgot about it, just as they did with IE.

IIS has started to falter, and .Net has seen some great growth, but looks like stagnating now as well.

Whereas Apple have some exciting products coming out, that seem to do very well.
That's like benchmarking Berkeley DB vs. MySQL. They are on totally different levels of complexity. You can't compare memory-only db performance against a disk based db, period.
Apple, unlike Microsoft, is well-positioned to take advantage of demise of high-tech industry as we know it. This demise has already happened once, with an industry that was "hi-tech" for centuries: clocks and watches.

http://abandontheweb.blogspot.com/2005/11/is-hi-tech-timeles...
In-memory with periodic snapshots sure implies "not durable," though. (That is, you will lose whatever data has not yet been snapshotted on a power failure or crash.) Replication doesn't fix that, unless you're willing to impose the latency of replication to different datacenters for each update. (I don't think Volt even supports this. Most systems don't.)
Well that was a great investment, right? What is it worth now?
It wasn't until Photoshop 2.5 that Adobe even had a Windows version. Look at PageMaker / Quark and it's the same story.

Education and creative markets were the bread and butter of Apple for the 80s and 90s, it's a no brainer business-wise.

At the time this article was written Jobs had been CEO for a month, it's a basic play to reassure the market and boost a falling stock price. If you look at what Apple actually did it was to move into consumer electronics. A transition that is arguably complete with iPad. The machine people consume software with is finally different from the machine they produce software with.
The Android Game-Changer Has Arrived
I wouldn't necessarily say that Apple doesn't have the patent pool for mobile devices (yes, the smart phone sector included) with Apple doing a lot of innovation in the form of multitouch, OS UI design, usability and a whole other range of other things.

Dismissing Apple outright is definitely the wrong thing to do.
I think that in the government sector, there are similar websites to BC Bid (Where the Province of BC and BC municipal governments post their product and service requests). Is this the same in the US?
http://www.bcbid.gov.bc.ca/open.dll/welcome
If anyone can defend against the over-litigious company that Blackboard is, it's Google.
They were always focused on the education market, with deep discounts to schools, way before the imac. I think the logic was that you get the kids early, then they buy macs when they grow up, and want to use them at work. Also, if everybody had skills in using macs, then companies would be buying mac rather than IBM PCs.
Here are previous threads

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=948036

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=526517

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432284
For yet another data point, my brother has learned a number of languages. His best language is Mandarin, which he started learning when he was 19. He speaks, reads, and writes at a college level, with no discernible accent. He has varying levels of fluency in a number of other languages including French, Thai, Indonesian and Japanese.

His method of learning a new language is to just start out memorizing vocabulary. He is able to achieve a sustained acquisition of about 100 new words per day. Once he has sufficient vocabulary he adds in grammar practice, sample conversations, etc.
Question Wish List:

Is Reddit inspired in anyway from Hacker News?

Is Reddit Profitable?

Any acquisition offers?
Male Antelopes Trick Females Into Extra Sex Opportunities
If Microsoft hadn't sold its 1997 $150mm investment in Apple, it would be worth $7.4 billion at close today. That's a 4250% return.

Instead they sold in 2003, at one of AAPL's lowest points. They made less than 20%. (It's hard to pinpoint exactly how much because Apple's SEC filing only indicates that Microsoft sold in Q2 2003, and it doesn't indicate the price agreed.)
If you think that's a serious crane, check out this bastard:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taisun

The space shuttle orbiter weighs 109 tons. The Taisun can lift twenty thousand tons.
>You can't compare memory-only db performance against a disk based db, period.

But...you can. What do you mean you can't compare? Clearly you can, however mortified you might be at that prospect.

A reasonable motorcycle can go from 0-60 in about 4 seconds. A reasonable car can do it in about 9 seconds. But you need to carry two passengers so the car is your only option, and such a comparison doesn't matter to you, but to a lot of people it's interesting if ultimately they just want to get from A to B as quickly as possibly. Then again if you want to transport goods maybe you need a truck, or a train.

This is so silly. Wait -- hand wavy -- that's right, nothing can be compared to Cassandra but pure love itself.
Good god I truly fucking hope they kill blackboard.

What a horrible service
Http://www.bluetie.com/signup/btProSignup1.php
Chargify.
Is it a "Blackboard killer" because it is by Google or because it is OSS? http://moodle.org has been around for a long time, has attracted many Blackboard defectors, and yet Blackboard is still around...
I was gonna say, isn't Blackboard it's own killer?
They'd probably just kill it with fire like they did with lala.
I agree it's a fallacy. Just note that I wasn't falling into that trap. The original author to whom I was responding was.

My point was entirely about whether hardware source code should be treated differently from software source code.
Ironic that I couldn't see the video (or that a video was there at all) on my iPad.
A Deeper Look at Tail Recursion in Erlang
I hope/wish so. Blackboard is one of the most unpleasant user experiences out there. It's not even well implemented in the back-end, too.
Blackboard is terrible, hopefully this takes off quick
Please vote my idea up on the site: http://www.americaspeakingout.com/questions/3795/america-s-n...

America's number one problem: Lobbyists. They corrupt the political system more than anything else. Solution: Make ALL politicians wear a "Nascar jersey" to work. Every politician should wear clothing with corporate logo decals. The bigger the payoff amount, the bigger the decal.
> The US constitution was just a somewhat refined offshoot of the British system.

I think it's important to point out that there is, in fact, very few similarities between the U.K. government, especially at the time, and the U.S. government.

The U.K. uses a parliamentary system of government without a written constitution. There is a single, essentially all-powerful, legislative body with no separate executive. They can literal change the structure of government by passing a law due to the lack of a constitution. The government is structured as it is due to tradition.

The only real similarity is that they also use the "Winner Takes All" voting system, in which the person that receives the most votes wins, as opposed to a proportional system used in other countries.

Other than that similarity, they're basically entirely different.
Warren Buffet Warns about Speculation---but in 1982
As much as I would love to see Blackboard killed by Google, CloudCourse is a "course scheduling system" whereas Blackboard (and Moodle) are "learning management systems". An LMS will have a huge number of features that CloudCourse won't...
The Fat Vs Lean Debate
Google, please add NumPy to App Engine
Reddit was acquired in 2006. http://techcrunch.com/2006/10/31/breaking-news-conde-nastwir...
I can't PM you for some reason, must be my low karma. I found a reflected XSS vulnerability since it doesn't really matter for this site, I'll paste it here, I hope you don't mind.Just html encoding the <, >, &, " characters will fix it.

http://www.ftfysearch.com/search?q=%3C%2Ftitle%3E%3C%2Fhead%...
Microsoft keeps a steady logo for the company, and updates the logo for their products. See Windows vs. Vista vs. Windows 7.

Apple doesn't have logos for their products, so they update their company logo instead.

Just different approaches.
Tweetlist for iPhone is A Worthy Contender
There have been many other scenarios in which I reviewed apps, but with Tweetlist, the situation was different.
Masten Space Relights Rocket in Air
1) I believe it's the other way around

2) Assuming yes but since Conde Nast is part of a private company, who knows how Reddit contributes to the income statement.

3) They were acquired by Conde Nast a few years back.
I think you mean Google bought android. And really, you have no idea when the iPhoneOS was even coded, but given that it is based on OSX coding started well before 2005.

But I think the real question is what Android would have been without the iPhone, because even after the iPhone shipped, Android was looking rather a lot like a conventional smartphone OS.
Contributing to open source doesn't just increase my perceived value (which it definitely has in concrete terms), but it also increased my actual value because I'm exposed to a much more competitive marketplace of ideas. Heck, even just using open source provides this benefit to some extent.

I consider myself a competent programmer, and I've definitely come up with some nice solutions to particular problems, but I've also been blind-sided by what in retrospect should have been obvious issues. I'm sure this happens less to great programmers, but even still the open cross-polination of ideas really makes up for the weaknesses in the human mind in remarkable ways. Within a single company there can certainly be many amazing minds and ideas, but even the biggest company has orders of magnitude less breadth of technical knowledge than the open source community.
Could Microsoft's investment be seen as a HUGE strategic blunder?

I don't think Microsoft would have invested had they known Apple would flourish so well. They would rather see a competitor crumble and die.

So why did they invest? And if they hadn't, were there others waiting to bail out Apple? I could google all this but figured there must be many who weren't 10 years old when this happened :)
Is C as good as dead, too, given your rockstar measures?

Seriously, I read plenty of vitriol about perl and PHP, and it turns out that in the real world people ARE continuing to use it. It may not be the latest hotness, but it has a stable following in many communities.

So enough of the cool kids act; let's stop spouting this regurgitated "it's dead" BS. It is a nonissue. It is just hot air blowing in an echo chamber, mixed with pseudointellectual semantic arguments. I would rather see "This is a cool new language that blah and blah" than "people are producing less books about their language".

On another note, for crying out loud, how many books does it take to tell you what $$ means? I think I read somewhere about someone's advice for getting employers to notice you: write a book. Sure, we need yet another book that says what the last 20 said.
This is kind of pedantic, but I think the word valuable might be better here than largest.

Apple is relatively small when compared to companies like Walmart, which has 2.1 million employees and almost 8x revenue.
I've worked in online advertising for 5 years and have been toying around with the same idea for a while now. What did you start doing? If you've got time wouldn't mind asking you a few q's? My email's dharmaone att googles mail service
Blackboard knows how to do enterprise sales. I'm not sure Google does. Until then, Blackboard's not going anywhere.

Google should acquire blackboard, keep their sales, fire their engineering.
Hopefully. With Google behind it they have a better chance of fending off the patent trolls masquerading as an educational services provider.
Inhaling any burned plant material causes a slight increase in (primarily lung) cancer risk.

Inhaling burned tobacco has an above average ability to cause cancer.

Common commercial cigarettes, in general, have other ingredients that become carcinogenic when burned.

Nicotine, while not directly cancer causing, depresses the immune response in the affected areas, increasing cancer risk in those areas. This also affects chew, gum, inhalers, etc. Due to the nature of the rapid regeneration of the mouth and throat, this is likely a significant factor in the increased caused risk for chewed tobacco.

Additionally, chewed tobacco can cause Leukoplakia, which increases the risk of Oral cancer.

Cancer risk (most to least): Smoking, chew/dip, inhalers, gum, snuff.
This is not sane practise. There's a technology trying to address this without you having to modify your web application at all:

http://chronicdb.com

The idea is to allow both the old version of the web application and the new version to work concurrently, with no errors.
Not available in Canada. :\
You might checkout dalpay.com. Global payment site here in Iceland, decent rates.
The more I think about this, the sillier your assertion seems that having your application running in the background is a necessity for functionality like push-intents. Its like you are saying that without all your apps running code running all the time, Windows or the Mac won't know what app to use when you double click on a file. And if you want an example of how to offer a range of network services without having to keep all of them running all the time, try reading about inetd. Its a pretty new idea, but I'm sure you can find something about it.
Blackboard is a publicly traded company worth ~1-2 Billion
Its so not worth it.
I doubt this will cause problems for Blackboard. I say that because schools don't go to Blackboard for their software; they go for their services and the CYA aspect of it. Like they say about Microsoft, "Nobody ever got fired for buying Blackboard".

If anything this poses more of a threat to Moodle.
Sadly - not fast enough. Moodle is interesting but non techie edu folks don't touch it.
First off, thanks! And sorry I didn't catch your comment earlier.

I'll make sure I focus on that in a later part of the series! :)
Anyone able to set up a demo (never used Google app engine or I would) to check out?
"God" is a meaningless, dangerous cliche.
Agreed, before we built cities we were cutting down forests for farmland. Before we built farms, we burnt down forests to create savannah to expand the grazing land so we could herd more cattle (yes, there was a disturbing trend 100,000's of years ago - up to about 1 million years ago - that wherever mankind lived, fire occurrence went through the roof)

People conveniently overlook our past whilst condemning our present.

I'm sorry to all those people who blindly don't see, but we are god. We aren't playing as this secular god, we have been it since long before we even acquired fire.

At our present point we can change the world in a heartbeat. If an ice age begins, we have the ability to produce vast quantities of green house gasses far more potent than CO2 or methane. Similarly, if the planet starts heating dramatically, we have the ability to release vast quantities of SO2 into the upper atmosphere and force the planet into a global dimming cycle like it was in between the 1960's-90's.

Similarly, with our construction of vast arrays of wind turbines there has been a noticeable decline in wind speeds in those areas. Incidentally, something many people have failed to remember from basic high school physics is that generators can act as motors and vice versa. If it ever came to it, we have the ability to change the direction of winds in localised areas.

There's even debate over whether we have the ability to cause the formation of rain (we invariably can heat+water, it just takes a lot more effort than the cloud seeding hocus pocus method), and scientists around the world regularly cause lightening.

Really, what do humans do that is not attributed to a god?
I completely agree. At my school Blackboard gets more and more unstable as the semester passes. By the end of the semester we begin to get bizarre and meaningless error messages, and it slows to a crawl.
Happiness is not having others try to tell you what makes you happy based off of some study.
Not to mention Windows Server / MS-SQL.
It's their duty to represent everyone in their constituency, not just the ones that are members of their political party.

I'm not sure that's true. In that case, there would be a moral argument against voting for third parties, since they definitely don't represent the views of a majority of people. And there'd be a moral argument against voting Republican in Manhattan, or Democrat in Utah.
Terrible customer service (Paypals is better, but only by virtue of existing :))
"So has the removal of prohibition removed problems due to trading in illegal substances? Answer, by your own admission, is no :)"

"For your scenario to take affect all drugs have to be
legalized."

"I feel the problem would not go away"

You seem to assume that the amount of illegal "effort" to supply illegal substances (with the violence that follows from those activities) has and will remain constant trough prohibition/legalization of some of the most common drugs (alcohol and cannabis). This contradicts basic economic theory. If there is a bigger demand (for illegal substances) there will be a bigger supply (of illegally distributed illegal substances) if an increase in this supply requires organized criminal effort (involving, among other things, violence) prohibition will lead to more crime. (It could also decrease other forms of crime but thats not the matter here.)

"Essentially what you are arguing is the idea of shifting poisonous assets (crime) elsewhere to allow positive gains in certain areas (cannabis industry/use)." I'm not arguing for anything, I'm trying to get the point above across. There are cost and benefits to prohibition of any substance. One of the most widely recognized costs (this is literally the first time I have hard it questioned) is that it causes organized crime.
If you make too little money, all you think about is money.
If you make too much money, all you think about it money.

I'd have to agree with this article. Personally, I think much of happiness comes from finding the middle ground where you don't don't have to think about money.
What? A link to this story and no one linked to the legendary video of Bill Gates appearing on the big screen at the Macworld Boston Keynote 1997, looming large over Steve Jobs and the crowd booing?

Here, I will do that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxOp5mBY9IY (skip to 3:30 if you want to see how the investment is received, skip to 4:40 if you want to see Bill Gates)
The only way this can ever happen, I think, is if humans are able to model the building blocks of the brain (i.e neurons) and the processes that created it (i.e. evolution), because there's just no way we'll ever understand all of the emergent behavior of a human brain, as I see it. After all, don't you need something vastly more complex than the thing you're studying in order to understand it?
I'll endorse everything oldgregg said here PLUS one critical factor: be competent.

You shouldn't expect to jump into the pool with the big dogs unless you can swim. Good talk is one thing, but if you can't back it up with genuine competency (unless you're working solo) you'll be found out fast and nobody will like you. At all. And you can forget about referrals after that.

I've worked large contract jobs for several years and love it. There are a few of us who follow each other around in my industry and we can spot the fakes pretty quickly. If you can really deliver on the goods--i.e., you're as productive as 5 or 6 average programmers and can communicate effectively--you'll be able to ask for what you want and get it most of the time.
yes there has been that "Carrot and Stick" TED talk posted here twice in the last 2 weeks; that basically helped me understand that if you can...

"Take money off the table, pay people enough to not have to think about money" ~ thats when they will perform best.
I was excited for a second.

This thing is extremely limited, and wouldn't get adopted by an institution for about 74 distinct reasons (e.g. data is stored in the cloud, which is illegal...)

Blackboard is a terrible terrible service, and all their customers hate them. They persist because they have ties to all the major schools and satisfy all the regulatory criteria required for LMS's.

LMS software is about 90% about sales, deployment and support and only 10% about the quality of the software itself.
Follow-up by FSF regarding yesterday's AppStore/GPL issue
Apple should buy Dropbox, but Dropbox shouldn't sell. I'm on Dropbox's side. :)