skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The key metric is not how far away your collaborator is in miles, but in minutes.

It is much easier to get around in San Jose. You could collaborate with a lot of people within a half-hour drive in San Jose, probably more than in San Francisco. NYC is similarly over-weighted for collaboration.
So irrelevant. Apple logo is indeed shiny, but it's 90ies-shiny. I much prefer Microsoft logo.
just a heads up, I'm getting a BadQueryError if my search term contains an apostrophe.
We need to stop Muslin from getting into this country! That damn loosely-woven cotton fabric keeps getting in here.

Yeah, what is sad is it is way too easy to troll in a place like that and come off as sincere as many actual arguments there are just as insane.
Ask HN: How fast is your site? (A short bootstrap story)
Hi HN,

Today I opened up the first public version of a product I've been working on: it's a performance monitoring service called Stella that's like Pingdom for makers.

http://www.blamestella.com/

Some background: I stopped working full time 2 years ago to focus on my own projects. I put everything I owned in storage, took a month off, and then moved in with my mom to cut costs (to a small town in the Netherlands). I spent the first year learning and writing Ruby and this past year learning everything I could about building a product and running a business.

It's a much longer road than I first expected and who knows where it will lead, but I'm really happy I took the plunge!
When I say American cigarettes are more dangerous, what I really mean is that cigarettes are more dangerous than other forms of tobacco consumption, and American tobacco is more dangerous than other tobacco.

For example, the levels of CEA (a cancer marker) in daily hookah smokers are so much lower than the CEA levels is cigarette smokers that they're actually statistically indistinguishable from non-smokers. Similarly, countries who don't grow tobacco in the same fields year after year using phosphate fertilizer have vastly less radioactive material in their tobacco.

http://www.harmreductionjournal.com/content/5/1/19

http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/sources/tobacco.html#footnote

The research on what about smoking actually causes cancer isn't very good yet, but if you combine the research that has been done with the data that shows the different points in history where lung cancer rates vastly increased or decreased, it starts to paint a pretty clear picture. For example, according to wikipedia, "From the 1950s, the incidence of lung adenocarcinoma started to rise relative to other types of lung cancer.[135] This is partly due to the introduction of filter cigarettes. The use of filters removes larger particles from tobacco smoke, thus reducing deposition in larger airways. However the smoker has to inhale more deeply to receive the same amount of nicotine, increasing particle deposition in small airways where adenocarcinoma tends to arise."

Again, there is no safe form of smoking, but all evidence points to the fact that smoking cigarettes made from American tobacco is vastly more dangerous than the ways in which people have used tobacco historically.
I might skip that, but I'd definitely read "How I Was Built" by Kurzweil's Artificial Mind.
It isn't :)

Flight Deck and Indy 500 on the atari st for a dutch company called 'aackosoft'.

Ages ago...
in memory vs not, will always have these kinds of results.

most people, most systems, aren't so hot about in memory datastores -- MySQL had MySQL-Cluster/NDB, and for lots of reasons it had trouble ever taking off.

For certain use cases, and definitely for benchmarking purposes, in memory datastores will always crush the competitors, but in the end, most people like reliable data storage.
Yesterday all you got was .net error pages.
Absolutely no changes? Seriously? This lets people control their privacy without needing to go through dozens of granular controls, which is a change. It also lets you completely opt out of platform in its entirety, which is a change. It also no longer requires pages and friends to be public, which is a change.
If you want to criticize that's cool, but stick to things that aren't completely false.
In this context, "common carrier" is a legal designation reserved for telecommunications carriers under the Communications Act of 1934. To date, ISPs are specifically not under that broad category, although I'd wager it's simply a question of when, rather than if.

The DMCA relationship you're thinking of is the "safe harbor" provision for ISPs that respond in a proscribed manner to copyright infringement notifications.

Wikipedia link (which is, sadly, very poorly edited right now): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier#Telecommunicatio...
Interesting: it took Teddy Roosvelt to rein in the excesses of the "guilded age". Because he was one of the super-rich perhaps.
Just so you know, Goldman Sachs' P/E has nothing to do with this discussion. GS is a player in an entirely different industry and it is useless to compare this one statistic between two tech companies.
Point taken. But has that stopped fusion researchers?
Not so irrelevant. I have no dog in this fight, I prefer linux over either, but the image that those companies project is very important in their contact with their target audience.

When given a choice between an ipod and a zune with twice the storage capacity the majority of teen-agers would probably pick the ipod.

When you sell consumer stuff 'cool' matters.

Microsoft always has to balance their business image with their 'cool' image and in most (hardware) consumer products (other than the Xbox) they seem to fail at that. Phones that run windows CE are (rightfully) seen as old fashioned, the zune was dead on arrival and so on.

Cool & shiny really matter.
Also I was very disappointed to find out that it actually had nothing to do with helicopters following the author.
Do we want a "brain in a box?"

Note that this idea is distinct from computers that solve complex problems on our behalf. Creating something with its own desires, ambitions, and emotions, just like us, except vastly more powerful, is there any reason to think something good will result from introducing such a thing into our environment? Does it ever go well for a species when a more intelligent species enters its niche and competes for resources?

As smart as Kurzweil is, I am always shocked that he takes for granted that such a development will be good for humanity. He scarcely gives a thought to the philosophical ramifications of a human being crossing over into a completely digital reality.

I think the question of whether super human intelligence is good for humanity is at least as important as the engineering questions about how to build one.
Apple Should Acquire Dropbox
Most use cases also don't have the entire data set equally active, and it's silly to pay to keep everything in RAM instead of just the hot parts.
It makes sense. Without a law like that, people with circulation/influence could manipulate the markets by buying, boosting and selling.
They should have just started a thread on 4chan. It would be faster I think.
The Ministry of Truth: A mass experiment in altering political memories
It's like anything else, you just need to use it in moderation.
I object! The Hulk, Superman and Clash of the Titans do not qualify.
I'm envious that you were able to effect change in a company that large (we're some measure larger or smaller than that); and I wish I could say I had the optimism to continue giving it a go.

edit: vague-ified company size per DannoHung's suggestion (not particularly worried, but those could be famous last words).
Understanding Python's "with" Statement
If the bolts holding the payload in place shear away under the lateral force of supporting the payload, the payload may fall and hit the hard inside of the launch vehicle, making the two events quite similar. (Indeed, the original drop I linked to occurred when the satellite was not correctly bolted to a table on which is was going to be tipped to one side in order to verify that it could withstand the stress of being in that physical orientation.)

That said, ugh's comment suggests my reasoning (as an explanation for vertical assembly) is either incorrect, incomplete, or both.
I think you mean 'fortunately'. A few trolls is a small price to pay for something approximating anonymity and freedom.
The data suggests otherwise:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.ht...

If you're going to lobby for prohibition of pot then please also focus your attention on alcohol as well. This is a far worse 'drug' IMO than marijuana could ever be.

I don't understand how anyone could think alcohol should be legal but not marijuana.

EDIT: Also notice from the linked article that drug use actually went down after legalization in Portugal.
I, for one, would rather that the main article links and comment links were blue/purple. The visuals on here frequently distract me or make certain tasks harder than they should be. "Managing" is not the same as a good experience.
So, when did Microsoft surpass Apple in market cap? 1992? 1988?
I don't know about the moderation, but what you said is entirely subjective - and quite possibly simply your perceptions of the two companies projected onto their logo's. You could equally well say that the MS logo on that page is elegant, simple and understated, while the Apple logo looks cheap, plasticy and tacky. Either personal opinion would be equally valid, just looking at the two logo's on that page.
I'll need to take another look at Hawkins book. In any case, Kurzweil is promoting the idea we can have AI equivalent to human intelligence in a few decades.
Programming an Arduino in C without the IDE
Why is human supremacy a necessity? Why must a child be flesh and blood? If we want our children to be smarter, more powerful, and happier than us, why should we create children as feeble as us?
>Goldman Sachs' P/E has nothing to do with this discussion

Nothing? Don't you think that's a little strong?

P/E reflects growth prospects, and a large, established financial company has limited growth prospects. Just as a large, established, coasting tech company tends to have lower P/E ratios. GS lives in an industry with lower P/E ratios, but saying that it has "nothing" to do with it is terribly wrong.
Or don't leave it there if you have a front seat passenger. Or only do it in an old car without front-seat airbags.

I am actually tempted to get one to stick on my wall now. Though I'm not sure if I trust the velcro enough.
You're making the mistake of thinking that illegalization reduces exposure to it. Study after study shows this to be untrue.
Hping3 examples
My consulting company uses the tagline "your domestic outsourcing partner". We work in Iowa.
I'm intrigued by criticisms of Wikipedia, because most of them are terrible. Often poorly constructed, illogical or just plain demented. This one however is a genuine problem. I first read about it on Wikipedia a few years back:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias

The origins of Wikipedia's bias

The average Wikipedian on the English Wikipedia is (1) a man, (2) technically inclined, (3) formally educated, (4) an English speaker (native or non-native), (5) white, (6) aged 15–49, (7) from a majority-Christian country, (8) from a developed nation, (9) from the Northern Hemisphere, and (10) likely employed as a white-collar worker or enrolled as a student rather than employed as a labourer.[1]

They've got various projects to counter this imbalance and it all seems worthwile. I'm glad to see coverage of things like the Second Congo War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War) which were mere stubs when I first looked at them have been thouroughly fleshed out.

I will say though, that no matter how many non-white, blue-collar, elderly woman from developing nations sign up for Wikipedia I doubt many will be interested in baby-sitting a list of Content Management Systems.
Why would I pay for volunteer support?
Crowdsourced Data Open Source for New Apps to aid Oil Spill Recovery
RT @CrisisCommons: RT @appcelerator: Announcing Oil Reporter: How Developers Can Aid Gulf #OilSpill Recovery
That works well, but the presentation is a little hard on the eyes.
How to Start an Architecture Firm in 7 Tips
3-year-old data? Getting stale by the minute.
I have these guys:

http://www.amazon.com/AKG-Acoustics-K-240-Studio-Headphones/...

they are wonderful. Great sound and very comfortable. You could keep them on all day and ears won't hurt.
I've been in that situation, too. I got out of it by us selling the company.
You should get rid of your co-founder and step up to be CEO yourself and start looking for someone who will do good work. Your co-founder might not have the incentive like you do, so maybe he feels fine with being average. There is no way to change such a person.
You need to learn some basic economics. (First question: Cocaine, heroin, opium, alcohol and marihuana used to be legal in the UK (and most other places), there was nothing like todays gang violence. Why? Second question: Why did crime increase during prohibition?)

http://www.albany.edu/~wm731882/organized_crime1_final.html
How do you verify the identity of the other person? That is, how do they prevent man in the middle attacks?
In-memory doesn't imply "unreliable". If you need high-availability you'll want to use replication anyway.
Key to a successful relationship: Re-establish and Return
Band-aid. Another form duplicating existing forms. The defaults are all that matter, and they didn't change?
You're really ignoring the obvious facts in favor of arguments over tiny minutiae. The App Store is a store. Not a conduit, not a dumb pipe, a store. Apple maintains it, Apple choses what to stock there, Apple specifies the terms of purchase and Apple makes a profit off each item it sells there. The developer just gives Apple his app to put in its store.

Analogously to this case, if my local store doesn't refrigerate its milk properly, I don't sue the dairy farmer. Apple's App Store is a store in exactly the same sense.
How should people contact you? There's no email address in your publicly visible profile.
The thing that's most interesting about all this is the predicament that Microsoft now finds itself in. They just lost two top guys - J. Allard & Robbie Bach - and you have to wonder just how rudderless Microsoft is at the moment. They've invested heavily in their core tech - mostly a good idea - but then they have really nothing to compete with Apple or Google in the mobile space, at least until their new phone os hits (and even then it faces a serious uphill battle). Balmer is probably wishing he had bought Palm at this point.

I wonder if Bach and/or Allard end up at Google... a GBox has a nice ring to it actually.
>and can't help feeling that exposing more people to that isn't a great thing.

So the solution is to throw them in jail?
Man you are way out of your head. You are comparing Fusion research to Diaspora? There has been tangible research done on nuclear fusion, there is a road map, we known how they plan to do it, they are building reactors, they have 100s of scientists employed working on it. They may not be successful, they maybe horrible failures, it might never happen. But they are working on it. Its way way far from the black board and you can actually see the work yourself.

What do you have with diaspora? Nothing! Other than some kids notion of what an open social network might look like. No code, no prior reputation, you don't even know if they can make a tic-tac-toe. You know nothing.

So please don't compare Diaspora, something that doesn't exist in any form, to something that does (facebook) or something that people are working on (fusion).
I hate to be glib but my economics is pretty good. Would you care to explain what you mean?
Apple has adapted their logo over the years - and their website - to reflect the changing times, microsoft has kept their logo the same for a very long time.

Now there is something to be said for keeping your logo the same, possibly forever. But the crowd that apple appeals to and that they intend to sell their gadgets and computers to loves shiny stuff, and apple is very good at making shiny stuff. It stands to reason they'd adapt their logo to that.

Microsoft has a much stronger presence in the corporate world and I think that is why their logo looks the way it does and why they don't want to change it too much. They try not to be a fashion statement, apple tries very hard to be one.
Collabora is hiring multimedia developers remotely.
http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2010/05/25/want-to-join-the-co...
Reasons to Start a Business
For the record; no I don't believe that is a solution either.
> Facebook does a tiny bit of entertaining and socializing,

Many people have had countless friendships reconnected and met other new people as a direct result of Facebook being as linked up as it is. Whether "tangible" or not, this is at least as valuable as an iPod to many.
> a GBox has a nice ring to it actually.

Let's not go there ok ?
The Harvard MBA Premium: $1.4 Million
Why Controlling Bosses Have Unproductive Employees
8 of the Best Free Linux Video Editors
Another headphone to consider is the AKG K81 DJ, for around $60-80. It's a closed supra-aural design (sits on your ear). I haven't tried them personally, but I've heard they sound fantastic.
Assume people distribute themselves according to that metric, then per-capita makes more sense than per area.
In that case, it would be a voluntary donation.
The Kurzweils and Drexlers of the world make a living by claiming that amazing technological advances (immortality, molecular nanotechnology, thinking machines) are far easier than they actually are. When these things fail to get developed in the timescales they predicted, they blame the scientists who failed to make it happen.
You don't personally use it to socialize so you say they don't provide value for the tens of millions who do and apparently get enjoyment from it. ... OK.
This HN post was a pretty good example of what you describe (not complete to your specs, but a nice start): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1365807

The professional logo goes a long way toward making it feel legit.

> If you are taking 3 paragraphs to explain what your app does, what problem it solves, or why people should care, well your idea is probably not that great, much less marketable.

This may also be a function of your marketing/copy-writing ability; it doesn't necessarily correlate with idea quality or marketability. It could also indicate that your focus simply needs refinement.
Apple is treading the same path to the same type of market dominance. Apple isn't the underdog any more. Time to take a second look.
before I opened it, I said to myself "oh great another article about the wikileaks founder"
If he wanted something a bit closer to the voltdb model, why not go with mongo since your writes aren't immediately put to disk? It's more of a measure of how quickly you're shuttling data over the wire.

When you agree that it's apples to oranges, why continue?
VMware gives Fusion a major speed boost with 3.1 update
This is obviously not enough to find anyone worthwhile. That being said, your best bet is to pitch a programmer who is willing to join your team for equity.

I would suggest going to local events, meetups, etc and reach out to a bunch of potential candidates..
GHC-iPhone - Code in Haskell, produce binaries for the iPhone
If the site hasnt changed policies after it is used in its intended manor, the re-tolling would be that much better.
Facebook finally gets it with new, simpler privacy controls
"Professional strength" velcro is some tough stuff. Kept a huge board heavier than an iPad on the wall for two years; when I had to remove the velcro from the wall, it took chunks with it.
You can make coroutines in Scheme via continuations, and you can also make one-shot continuations out of coroutines.

"Revisiting Coroutines" by de Moura and Ierusalimschy (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.58.4...) is a pretty good paper about using coroutines, with Lua as the example language.
Hiring the First 5 Engineers
I suppose you learned everything you know about Emacs by rote memorization and repetition of the manual, and absolutely no exploratory playfulness?

I suppose the gripe I have is not "wrong; humans can learn languages by immersion!" but "why the societal crosslink between deliberate learning, and not-fun?".

Is there no way to learn 30,000 words by any motivation other than fearing for your life from a disappointed father?

The line blurs more when he says "Immersion doesn't work" then describes his learning method which is ... (wait for it) ... completely submerging himself in the language he is learning for hours and hours, reading it, writing it, speaking it, paying attention to it - all in a country and in a school where everyone spoke it ... immersing himself in it.

I cite: http://www.fluentin3months.com/studying-will-never-help/

"""Studying will never help you speak a language, but (as long as you do it right) studying will help you speak a language better.

Most people don’t see the difference here. That one crucial word changes absolutely everything you need to take into consideration.

If you already speak but your conjugations aren’t great or you need to quickly increase your store of vocabulary about a specific topic, then by all means study. Need to pass a test in school? Sure, study for it. When the goal is to pass a test or improve your grasp on something specific, then study is the way to go.

But if you don’t speak the language confidently right now, then it’s time someone broke this news to you: studying is not the way to get this confidence!"""

(But they are aiming at slightly different targets - Benny aims to be conversationally fluent in 3 months, The Korean to gain college level mastery in two years).
Guys that open sourced GHC-iPhone are currently hiring game developers.

http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2010-May/07817...
"Cassandra writes to disk. VoltDB is an in-memory database. So I gave both systems plenty of RAM to hold the data set and turned Cassandra's consistency settings pretty low."
So in memory in both cases. Cassandra has to write a log, but not synchronously.
Dancing your way into EffortLess Web Development with Perl and Dancer
It runs pretty well against http://127.0.0.1 :-)
Wikipedia is rapidly becoming irrelevant - because of the deletionists. Looking on Wikipeidia is by definition looking for little-known or obscure facts. These are exactly what get deleted. It will soon be a shrine to the obvious.
Appsaurus (YC 07) debuts iPad recommendations before Apple, Mitch Kapor invests
ask hn: Asus refuses to honor my warranty, what should I do?
Perl's been on an upward trajectory for years now

I have significant doubts about that (I speak as someone who did perl programming for years).

the best Perl hackers don't seem to have gone anywhere

Depends on who you consider to be the best, but a lot of them have gone to Ruby, Haskell, Clojure, and other more modern languages. Perl had its day. That day was the 1990s and early 2000s.
I want to point out, that this entire blog post is dedicated to being able to manage your profile accessibility in a more simplified manner, yet not a single link in the blog post takes users to the direct page in which they can make the changes being referenced. This matters because non-savvy users don't have the slightest of a clue where to edit their privacy settings. When Facebook rolled out their first major redesign, status posts came in by the numbers that people couldn't figure out where to post new pictures, despite having an icon right under the status box that they could have clicked.

Secondly, I just went and checked out the instant personalization feature, which I explicitly opted-out of when it launched, only to find the feature re-enabled.

Things have changed, but nothing changed at all.