skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With people using ads to target potential employers, surprising loved ones...

Is there a ad potential for User->Business targeting, User->User targeting complementing the current Business->user targeting?
You should definitely join the blacksmithing group. I'm definitely on the casting part of the work as opposed to the smithing. but I know a bunch of great blacksmiths. I think you will be able to find a great group of interesting personalities that somehow get drawn to metalworking (sort of like HN)

One great resource for metalcasting is Backyard Metal Casting. www.backyardmetalcasting.com He will probably answer any question you could possibly have about casting.

Good luck!
I think VPNs are there to stay. They do not defeat the purpose of the firewall.
There's an idea! In the past I played the saxophone quite fanatically but had to stop because of lung trouble (weak spot in a lung, too much pressure).

Didgeridoo...

What a bummer to have to pay for your medical bills out of pocked, weren't you insured ?
It sure is hard to keep the general public's attention when there are no dramatic, overt symptoms yet.

Who knows what sort of pain they're going to inflict (or cost they'll exact) once they choose to monetize?
Dear god. I just realized that Mark Zuckerberg is the new Bill Gates. I give it another week before trolls all over the web start writing referring to Facebook as Fa$ebook.
5000ft is one hell of a depth of water - dump gravel in and it will spread over a huge area. Especially if you dump it one boat load at a time.
Imagine the pressure the oil is under to be flowing out under 5000 ft of water. I don't think it's a simple situation. I liken it to people who don't know how to program talking about how simple or complex a particular problem is.
Sports - absolutely cannot live without. Enjoy it as much as my work.

Anything goes: soccer, volleyball, squash, or rarely some water sports. I follow a lot of sports too.
A good rule of thumb: if you think a product is absolutely great until you hit "view source", you're probably missing the point.
Is it remote desktop too? Can you take control of the users computer as well?
Luckily, he didn't. No need to give each other nightmares, is there?
Basically that's what he was saying: that Aspergers or borderline autistic are basically less accurate descriptions than BPD etc.
No, it's James Cameron's cover story for shooting the Abyss 2.
I read the "In Defense of Homophobes" post.

Yeeesh. I guess it's better for that guy to be working in physical science than public policy.
I think it's your fault for choosing to move to China then starting a web business that needs US access. It was very well known what China was like with respect to the web before you did this. It's a bit like moving to the North Pole to start a beach resort then complaining about how cold it is, all the snow, etc.
"So I see attempts to diminish it as being ultimately pointless."

Step one: Keep the patient alive. The welfare state crushing the economy is the worst case scenario.

It doesn't matter how wonderful free health care, glorious welfare benefits, or anything else is if we can't afford it. "Can't afford it", at this level, is not merely a statement that we aren't trying hard enough. It is a statement that we physically lack the resources to follow through on the promises being made.

Our task is not to design the best economy we can have with ten times the resources we have. Those economies are irrelevant because they can not exist. (Yet, but when we do reach that time we will still have to work with what we have, not what we wish we had.) The task is to design the best economy we can have with the resources we have now. Sitting here and pining for the economy we can't have is bad enough, committing to building it nonetheless is simply death.

The critical thing that absolutely everyone is going to have to realize is that whatever horrible reaction you have to this point is not due to me, and shooting the messenger won't help. It is simply the way things are. It is reality. Denying reality will have the usual consequences.

It turns out that the people who said the welfare state is a bad idea may have been racist, may have wanted poor people to die, may have been heartless, may have been selfish, may have been any number of the bad nasty words thrown at them, but they were also right.

Your other identified problems are totally correct, and it's worth talking about solutions to them that don't involve sacrificing our entire civilization. I don't know what they are. But the welfare state has failed. Past tense. We're in the beginning of the end, but the bell has tolled and it will not be salvaged in anything like the form it has now. The only question is whether we commit civilizational suicide over that fact, or find something that does work.

(A lesser welfare state may well be the answer, but something is going to have to be done about the incentives for politicians and welfare recipients to grow the welfare state with no meaningful countervailing interest, which includes everyone who has been receiving more money that was justified by their actual work, including things like teachers and auto line workers. Something has to contain the rate of growth of welfare to the rate of growth of the economy itself. Something that allows it to go negative if it has to. Something strong enough that Congress can't just pass a law to increase things 10% this year. I have no idea what this could be.)

(Edit: Modding me down is just shooting the messenger. It is objective truth that we can not afford the path we are currently on. It's pretty close to objective truth that even just shrinking it today, but leaving in place the same incentives that led to our unsustainable course won't help much. It's not even terribly tricky math.)
Need for Speed Shift Come on HTC Evo 4G
I think it is called 'elections' ;)

Pity the supreme court isn't elected but nominated.
> 1. Django has a steep learning curve

Everything has a steep learning curve once the framework has been integrated into an actual product. You could say the same about having to learn a new PHP deployment, or a Java servlets based product.
Aye, all reports indiciate the only one in the room with him before the suicide was Braun and she didn't walk out of there either.

He certainly felt that way, but I don't think I've ever seen any evidence to show that those were his final words. It's a great quote, though.
Gates: made computing ubiquitous; I've seen Windows boxes in rural towns in 3rd world countries
Goldman Sachs & Co: "bunch of cash-driven assholes"

I think Gates has done considerable more good for the world than the other assholes of the business world.
This needs repeating:

> This is how it is possible to write modular, scalable applications today: you need a very fast "global state" (the DB side), caching, ways to create queues of jobs as soon or later you need to process things in the background, and sometimes you need the ability to pass messages around in a pub/sub many-to-many scenario. And this things are converging, they are just different sides of the same things, at least when the DB part is designed as it is in Redis.
bc/dc have been replaced with the versions from OpenBSD:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/svn-src-head/2010-January...
Next Generation Achievements
I've worked inside various China government departments. In many respects, they have less data on China citizens than the U.S. government has access to on U.S. citizens.

If China is on a "1984 path", all I can tell you is the U.S. and UK are ahead of them at the moment in terms of data collection.

As to needing to be an insider to get your business going. This is only true for certain types of business. For those types, as a foreigner, you'd do well to stay out of it anyway, without regard to how connected you are.
Lord of War.

An extremely cool and informative movie, and utterly underrated IMO. One of my all-time favorite movies, I watch it once or twice a year.

From IMDB:

"In the 1980s in Little Odessa, the Ukrainian immigrant Yuri Orlov decides to change his economical life and becomes an arm dealer with his brother Vitaly Orlov. His business of gunrunner supplying illegal weapons in disturbed areas of the planet increases with the end of the Cold War, and Yuri bribes a Russian general to sell most of his arsenal. Meanwhile, he becomes a millionaire and uses his money to seduce the beautiful Ava Fontaine and they get married, having a son. The detective Jack Valentine chases Yuri trying to put him in jail, but in the end he understands that Yuri is a necessary evil for the interest of his nation."

The movie portrays Yuri (Nick Cage, whom I normally dislike intensely) in shades of grey rather than a black or white stereotypical Hollywood character. He drags his mixed up brother (Jared Leto) into his arms smuggling business as his business partner. Valentine (Ethan Hawke) is the straight-up Interpol agent on his case that won't break the rules under any circumstances, even if he can get away with it.

The movie deals with themes like family, love, politics, and business extremely well. The ending isn't the typical sunshine and puppy dogs either, but reflects what is most likely to happen in real life.

It has some great quotes also:

Without spoiling too much, there's one point where Yuri tries to get out of the arms trade (diversifying away from core strengths) and into honest import-export but it doesn't work out too well - "The margins are too thin".

When asked why do you continue to deal arms, even when wealthy - "Because I'm good at it".

"I've sold guns to nearly ever army except the Salvation Army".

Movie Poster Quote: "There's a firearm for every 12th man, woman and child on earth. The only question is...." (big puff on cigar) "...how do we arm the other 11?"

Trivia: in one scene, Yuri is running guns into Africa on a cargo plane. Literally one week earlier, the exact same plane was running guns into the Congo.

Great movie, can't recommend highly enough.
Adobe isn't right, Apple is more wrong.
I also run a web company in Beijing, and feel your pain. Quite simply things like google groups which help in work, and access to coding/design blogs and material/advice. It's a fucking nightmare and pisses me off to no end.

I wake up, and click through HN feeds and 30% of them don't work. Even with a proxy you have to connect which might mess with your other settings, refresh, links come in slow. Then you need to disconnect since most VPN's tunnel ALL traffic via their servers. You are also logged off MSN so any conversations go missing.

China is like IE6. Only worse.
iumltvr
It is, in fact, both snarky and ignorant, but to tell the truth, I'd love to spend some time in China, but I worry about connectivity. Since the only news I ever hear about the Internet in China is bad, what am I supposed to think? That maybe it would just be OK?

I suppose having functional health care might make up for spotty connectivity.

Actually - could you email me? I'd like to get an idea of cost-of-living in different cities in China. I'm a technical translator (and do some sysadmin) and so continual connectivity is drop-dead necessary for my livelihood, but about a year or two from now I'd really like to go to China for a year or two to poke around and get to know it.
If separators are meant to be put before each item, as in comma-first style, they shouldn't have been commas in the first place. Commas should be used just like they're used in natural written language. If I were to design a language that uses comma-first style, I'd replace commas with bullets:

var a = "ape"
• b = "bat"
• c = "cat"
• d = "dog"
Cooking AND eating :) I love to try new recipes and experiment with food. Apparently my neighbors love that too.
What software do you recommend/use...Abelton live?
One down, one billion to go? :)
If anything Boiler Room is a morality tale saying you shouldn't let the pursuit of material wealth destroy your relationships and that their are no shortcuts to success. That's what I got out of it anyway.
Interesting analogy, but reasoning by analogy is fallacious. Also the bit at the end in which he says that human bodies aren't expected to grow to 3 or 4 meters tall, so why should we expect the economy to grow like that, is particularly flimsy.
models/ORM
Doctrine does better job.
- abstract model definition via yml file
- multiple connections/databases/environments easily managed
- Cool API (shortcuts, relations, custom tables etc.) + DQL for queries + support for multiple DB engines

admin interface / CRUD interface
- they are easy to generate but easier to customize under symfony.
- you can do 90% of the stuff via a config file generator.yml.
The rest is extending the generated code and customizing queries to the model

configuration
- you can do more via the config files in Symfony and control your project/applications vs Django.

forms system
- the abstract forms system comes with generated forms based on your model, widgets with validations, binding with your model, customizable renderers.
You can have a custom CRUD interface up and running and linked to your tables in less than a few minutes.

routing
- routing.yml and sfPatternRouting does a much better job without using complex regex patterns
- Also, all routes are abstract, understandable and well located.

testing
- Unit testing and functional testing is very well done. You can launch specific tests, launch failed tests only, call your model/forms easily because they are all objects, simulate a browser session etc.
You can do all that stuff with Django but will a lot more code.

framework vs API
- symfony abstracts anything useless as a plugin where Django tends to integrate some of it in their Framework (CSV, PDF generators etc.). That's a lack of vision.

Anyway, just a couple of points, I could go on and on ;-)
I go climbing with a coworker before work 2-3x a week. The problems in climbing seem similar to the problems in programming, so it's a good physical and mental wake-up for the day.

A ton of other programmers I know climb as well (we had an engineering offsite at Planet Granite in SF a few months ago), and I also see a ton of Googlers and other software people at Mission Cliffs on a regular basis.
I'm not too excited because I always use the development version of Django. Django-trunk is always surprisingly stable and hasn't given me any crashes.
I'm surprised there aren't more parkour practitioners here. I find it is one of the most physically demanding things a person can do, it is almost entirely free, and it requires both extreme focus and tons of creativity. Of course, the downsides are that you have to be in amazing shape (or work your way up to it) and that it does tend to result in small injuries, but I would say no more than a martial art.

Definitely a great way to get out, move around, and stay focused.
> I suppose having functional health care might make up for spotty connectivity.

Tough choice. Somewhere in the 'hackers hobbies' threads someone details that he had to pay $100K out of pocket for medical expenses.

As for the connectivity, simply set up a VPN on a box that you alone own and use and I'm sure you'll be fine.
With Redis, memcached finally has a contender for most awesome cache... thing. However I'm surprised I don't see more benchmarks. Performance should be roughly the same unless there's huge I/O contention for persistent storing.
Mmmmmmm, yeeeeeaaaaah
A Look Back at 50 Years of Lasers
Build It: An LED Lamp that Visualizes Data From the Web
How Shah Rukh first met Gauri | Downhunt.com
Not always. Different ISP's block different things and work/home connections also have different rules.

Once I came home to find they blocked the port to SSH & VPN. After 1 month of fighting with the IT management in the local building they opened it again.
We have one of those as well, they arent suitable for any site where you are expecting 100's of queries per minute (unless you dont touch the db :)) the gateway error is probably a lack of django processes being made available to serve requests. This is probably nothing to do with the framework itself and is a hosting issue, try another provider, just my 2cents..
I live in Beijing, post away
Wow...had no idea that was a sport! Just read a bit on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airsoft
same here, although I am excited about 1.2 being released as it will mark the end of the bug tracking stage, and the start of the 1.3 feature discussions.
My wife is Chinese as well. She manages our China company. We're registered as an IT company. Its not a WOFE, but a full Chinese entity with only Chinese shareholders, which has some benefits. I'm the General Manager of the company.

Good luck with your business. I do recommend getting a company in order as soon as you can afford it. For the most part, so long as you are not cheating the tax man, you can get away with operating without proper company structure for a while. Also, when you do setup a company...shop around different districts for tax deals. Some districts in Shanghai, for example, may give you a lower tax rate to encourage your type of business. IT is usually a preferred business type.
I spend all of my time chasing women around. Unfortunately, this isn't really relaxing.
Skype Drops Windows Phone 7
Starcraft ;)
A propos snark and ignorance, my wife is Hungarian, and as my other reply makes clear, this is less "red scare" and more "lack of connectivity scare". If you want to imply that all Americans live in fear of Communism, I can find you plenty that meet your prejudices, but painting us all with the same brush is pretty much calling the kettle black.
Gravel is porous. If the oil is overpressurized, covering it with gravel may slow the leak down but it won't stop it. And you've then made any other attempt to do something about it impossible.
I am looking forward to the time when Skype has cross-platform group video and screen sharing. I don't use gotomeeting nearly as much for one-on-one screen sharing, but need to bring it out for mutli-party screen share.
I agree with you. Any solution they do come up with will probably only have an impact until the relief wells are completed (knock on wood) in two months. Dumping/packing in gravel (not from the surface, but via underwater delivery) does seem like a good idea.
No remote control (yet). Remote control + group would almost eliminate the need for GotoMeeting or WebEx for me.
Cost of living ain't low, unless you live in a village. Shanghai is more expensive than NY. A beer is 45RMB, and that's for a Bud, not a fancy micro. Live like a local and you forgo comfort for cost. Anything foreign or of genuine quality is 2x the price as the western world. Even HK is a deal, unless you have to buy or rent property.Every time I go for business, I do all my shopping for 100% originals, not fakes. The price difference is astounding.

By not caring about the politics, you enable the problem. The CCP is making a mint off the US and becoming unstoppable. Society is crumbling and the rights and freedoms of the average citizens are falling as quickly. Culture? Where does the CCP fit into that? Communism, when did that become China's culture?

Stepping on 1 billion people to raise up 300 million is not progress.
The problem is that consumers are likely to reject, or be upset by, paying more for an identical version. If book publishers got rid of hardbacks and started introducing paperbacks at the same retail price as hardbacks used to cost, the market would probably not respond well. With ebooks it's even worse, since a lot of benefits of books (ability to loan and resell, quality of layout and production, etc.) are lost for ebooks and not necessarily made up for by some of the increases in convenience.

I don't think a simplistic initial price premium is the answer to this problem but I also don't know what the answer is.
Node.js + Resque = crazy delicious
Piano, guitar
My main two:
1) working out. Normally something outside: running around Red Rocks, jogging and looking at the mountains, playing ultimate frisbee, etc
2) board games. Puerto Rico, Race for the Galaxy, Dominion, Hansa Teutonica... not Settlers of Catan, which seems to be just recently getting popular and is too luck-based for my liking.
Background on Bilski http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_re_Bilski
Please clarify, it's the government, not all Chinese people, who can be as friendly and kindly as every faithful human on the earth.
Price is not a multiple of cost: it is set by the market. Kindle is a closed platform owned by Amazon, and they can charge all the market will bear. That's the downside of closed platforms.
"In a confession... that is sure to raise new questions about its privacy policies..." The data wasn't private! Questions should not be posed about a nonexistent point.
On very rare occasions, vengeance is also very profitable ;-)
So Django has a lot to learn by not having a lot of YAML config files? Its lack of YAML is actually a design goal.
Can you give me an example of thinking critically and rationally vs thinking analytically?
Long entertaining article (which I intend to finish), but as usual short on actionable information.

Here's what I would like to have access to:

Input-

1) OS

2) patch level (for simplicity I should be able to input "current")

3) the AV software(s) on my box

Output-

1) known vulnerabilities for this system configuration

2) what could be lurking on the system that hasn't been detected

3) methods of detection for items under (2)

4) remedies (including rebuild your box, in the worst case)
I don't understand the 'junk shot' plan. They're talking about shooting old golf balls, knotted rope scraps, and shredded tire chunks in, followed by cement? I guess I just assumed that in such a highly engineered industry, they'd have a design and spec for the 'junk', rather than relying on what sounds like random, uncontrolled, scrap.

Maybe that's just popular description, and in reality the junk in the junk shot is very well controlled?
I cannot imagine what "quality" IT solutions you sold over here. Where did you get your HW and SW from, the IT malls run by teenagers? Internet blocking not a problem? I guess you don't read much online. It amazes me what I cannot get access to without my VPN. No videos, no blogs, no web 2.0. The world is passing China by.

But, I guess you are back in the safety and security of the good ol' USA, so it ain't your problem anymore.
Well that's not his real name, and unless he changed it, as suggested above, then it sure looks like it.

Christopher Poole was only used because of the CP meme reference
Exactly... It's common for epople to think that the framework covers every aspect of the technical architecture of the actual website/service itself - probably a natural assumption due to how the web evolved - Apache, static files, then some light scripting, then PHP. it doesn't - it's just an underlying framework.
If you're expecting web-scale traffic - you have to engineer for it from the ground up - servers, content-delivery networks, design decisions, caching strategies and technologies.... yadda yadda yadda.... no framework is a magic pill that does it all - and if it were, it would quickly be outdated and inflexible.
StartupQuote.Tumblr
If HN members have any questions or comments about the Automata article, I'd like to hear them.