skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
About CD and DVD Duplication
"Eliminating 6.001 also seems to me a part of a trend to allow more freedom in the EECS curriculum."

What the elimination of the required for everyone 6.001-4 (EECS's Unified???) says is that the department no longer believes there's a broad core of materiel everyone needs to learn. As described to me, a MIT EECS degree used to mean that an EE wouldn't freeze up when asked to do some embedded programming and a CS wouldn't freeze up when having to integrate digital electronics into a project.

Today, a MIT EECS degree means something different. This new thing may be better, may be worse, which will depend on lots of things and the judgment of history.

And agreed on the dropping of 6.001. If I had been able to finish my degree in Chemistry (finances prevented that) 6.001 would have been all I would have really wanted to take out of the department's offerings.

It certainly was and it a tremendous and pioneering crown jewel of CS (and just happens to cover or provide the foundation for just about all of CS that I'm really interested in). And the promise of teaching a 12 unit version of it (the old version was 15 (that means number of hours per week it in theory consumes)) somehow dropped by the wayside....
>Over the last decade, Wall Street has declined to reward Microsoft for its superior profit. The explanation is simple: Professional investors don’t believe Ballmer, and they don’t see bigger profits in Microsoft’s future.

This seems to suggest Wall Street has been wrong about Microsoft for the past decade.

Likewise, I started seriously worrying about - and predicting - a housing bubble-based recession in 2004. [1] I was wrong about it every year between 2004 and 2009.

[1] http://www3.sympatico.ca/taylormcgreal/thecomingcrash.html
This was one of the ideas that lead me to make a mobile version of HN. It uses the same concept but provides a normal HN interface with a link that extracts the article text. http://toadjaw.com/hn if you wish to see or use it.
It's a pity that browsers couldn't just tell you the length of the part in the header of each part.
Oh look, Time uses Tynt.
Betamax was technically superior to VHS, but VHS won because its cheap, permissive licencing earned it the crucial network effects that made it the default platform. (Incidentally, you could say exactly the same thing about MS-DOS.)
Possibly used for risk management, generating lots of different scenarios and calculating their P&L impact. This would include VaR calculation.

Some derivative pricing models require a lot of cycles.
This feed works great. It gets the top viewed feeds and also extracts the story excerpts and shows them directly in the HN feed:

http://readablefeeds.appspot.com/readability/feed?url=http%3...
In fact, I used to work for a company that does exactly this and has done it for many years now. They just last year (or thereabouts) released their newest version that is supposed to run over all the various bits o' data it collects automatically and generate ads tailored to every customer.

(www.sitebrand.com if you're intersted, or just google "web personalization" and you'll find a bunch of their competitors, who also do a bunch of very neat things in this space.)
From the article:

> Betamax wasn't so much a bad product as a lesson in marketing gone awry.
Im always impressed how quick the porn industry is to adopt new technologies. Good for them, they have their heads screwed on more than some tech outfits.
Pakistan lifts ban on Facebook
I studied mathematics as an undergraduate and am now pursuing advanced study in computer science. The foundation that studying advanced mathematics provided me for further study in CS is rock solid, particularly since my interests lie in artificial intelligence realms of CS. I've also found that in "the working world", once you prove you can code, you are a favored candidate for more interesting, complex job assignments by your employer.
"LISP is worth learning for a different reason — the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot." -- Eric Raymond (How to become a Hacker).

I wonder what percentage of people who "get Lisp" manage to stay happy working in other languages.
Most of the devs I encounter recently are at least curious about different families of language

- ruby or python (GTD lang's)

- java, C and derivatives

- concurrent/FP: ocaml, clojure, scala, haskell, clean, erlang, F#

- lisp/scheme, dylan

- smalltalk, factor, Ioke, forth,

Fortunately, you can spend all weekend reading about languages:

- hacker news; reddit; infoq.com; artima.com; theServerside.com and .net; Lambda the Ultimate
The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world.

WOW! I haven't heard that quote before. It quite aptly sums up the situation.
Intel did made a very serious move on the low cost front, by letting TSMC sell SOC's with ATOM cores. that was really against the standard intel profit model , but they knew they had to do it.

The last i heard is that nobody(or maybe a single company), took them up on their offer. there could be many reasons for this : price, lack of trust of intel by hardware/SOC manufactureres, power consumption ,investments and experience in ARM development, the ability to reuse ARM based assets in many computer platforms(netbook, tablet, phone)

Maybe intel's move was the right one , but just too late.like you said , the innovator's dilemma in action.
It's a fairly political question in the US. Emotional people believe in emotional solutions, like the death penalty, physical discipline, healing prayer. Logical people believe in logical solutions, like medicine, research, and education. The main difference that persists is that those approach any issue emotionally will end up ignoring the source of the problem and just attack the result, while the permanent cure is to fix the source.
Same here (Montevideo, Uruguay) - the eastern part has the most expensive neighbourhoods (also, the south part of the city is more expensive than the north, but that's because the southern part is the waterfront).

Another interesting thing is that the hill to the west of downtown, which should be the most expensive part of the city if it followed some European city pattern (it has a beautiful view, and even a golf course), is actually one of the poorest (same for Río de Janeiro, which has the "favelas" in the hills IIRC).
Dropbox sends data directly to/from Amazon S3 for its storage. Dropbox themselves don't provide any storage. Here is S3's pricing:

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing

S3 charges for both storage and data transfer. Their most expensive data storage cost is 0.15USD/GB ie 7.50USD/month for 50GB. The more storage you use, the less per GB it costs, so I'm guessing Dropbox pay a lot less than 0.15USD/GB.
I think the reason multipart works that way, is so you can stream data that you don't know the full length of beforehand.

But afaik, that's pretty much never the case with file uploads, unless you are uploading a file that is still growing in size - so yeah, it's annoying : ).

('felixge2' because my other account is in noprocrast mode: )
Latest Top 500 Supercomputer List Released
Sorry, hadn't seen your reply, posted the same :)

(OT: more than 1 Uruguayans on HN, on the same thread? Nicolas Jodal pointed me towards here, you?)
Which means it wasn't a terrible invention at all. So again, why is it on this list?
Twitter is not censoring flotilla.
Apple Sold 2 Million iPads In 59 Days
My common reaction to people saying this is the simple fact that you do not get bigger if you consume less calories than you burn throughout a day. If you eat 2000 calories, and you burn 2000 calories then you do not gain weight, period.

Yeah, some people burn calories at an easier/faster rate by just living (they have a fast metabolism), but it's a known fact that walking x miles will burn y calories, so you eat proportionally to your caloric expenditure.

Any obese person that argues otherwise is ignoring physics, and is just not trying. My gut feeling (sorry!) is that these obese individuals playing the genetic card are confusing their hunger for their metabolism. It is shown that obese individuals get hungry sooner and that hunger is present longer even after eating (it's a hormone that causes hunger), but this is still preventable.
>It is licensed under the following terms: you must pay me $0.0001 per hour per CPU core you run it on.

Reminds me of the Wheat and Chessboard Problem.
Under the Waves, a Deep Unknown
CORRECTION: but we all know that most suits are interested in paying as little as possible
Can't we directly conclude from your argument that the obesity epidemy can be entirely solved by fixing the environment, which is probably easier than fixing the genes ?

Heroin harms us because of our genetic makeup, yet we don't talk about how heroin-induced illness has genetic causes. We simply try to keep people away from heroin.
Consolidation of multi-dimensional hierarchical data can be surprisingly compute intensive. Combine that with VaR calculations etc. then it doesn't surprise me that serious kit is required.
> Any AppEngine developer could tell you not to use it like this

I'd really wish for some AppEngine developer to tell me how's the proper way of designing entity groups. The only advice given is to not exceed a single user's data, otherwise it's too big.

Really, I want to see an example of a request handler that creates data in multiple entities and takes care to not create duplicates.

> It would be very interesting to see what the results would be with some more realistic testing.

IMHO, my experience with AppEngine's datastore has been pretty bad ... the performance varies greatly based on factors you can't control ... i.e. processing something that does well on slow Fridays, may throw the 30 secs timeout error on Mondays.

Also, I don't know how people deploy real-world apps on it ... a non-relational datastore requires custom indexes (i.e. precalculated queries done by building specialized entities out of your quasi-normalized data).

You can't do that easily because of the 30 secs limit that also applies to cron or queue jobs. I tried a workaround by having a queue task that processes 5 rows at a time and then reschedules itself. The stuff was so god-damn awful to debug, and the results so unpredictable (30 secs timeout for 5 rows / concurrency issues) that I felt like crying.

But yeah, it's fine for hosting a blog engine on top of it.
I have no doubt twitter censors content.

When George Bush was up here in Canada on a speaking tour last year I was in the first car stopped at the light while the police blocked traffic for the motorcade.

I was sitting there, so I took pictures and tweeted about the experience while waiting and while the ex-president's cars went by.

By the time I got home 20 minutes later, those tweets were no longer in my account.

I know they hit the twitterverse because a couple of my friends were able to re-tweet what I'd posted because they were using desktop clients that stored the messages.

My reaction was surprising at the time: I wasn't mad. I was scared.

I can understand why officials would be worried about tweets giving away details that could be used maliciously, but this was happening in real time. The president was THERE, at that moment. There was less intelligence value to my tweets than there was in the advertising for his attendance at the speaking engagement.

But still, it was scary and I understand much more clearly what people living in oppressive regimes must feel daily.

I have those tweets, reposted by others on my behalf, so the Internet healed itself. Can't stop the signal. . . .
Lets assume there is not just no social value, but a negative social value to shorting. I fail to see how you can make the leap from saying that shorting is bad for society to saying that we should ban shorting. Alcohol is bad for society, we should ban alcohol. Television is bad for society, we should ban television.

In America, it's currently Memorial Day, when we celebrate the people who have fought and died to defend our freedoms -- even freedoms that seem bad. Our soldiers carry our flag into battle and die for our right to burn that flag in protest of their actions.

I hope you aren't an American, given the way you so flippantly propose throwing away freedoms because it might hurt poor little society. "Society" isn't a thing. There are only people. If you propose a change in the laws, then you need to argue about individuals and the liberties they will gain or lose, the freedoms that will be protected or weakened. If you propose throwing away some liberty, you must make a very strong case indeed, as it is much easier to destroy liberty than to win it back.

You are essentially proposing that we take freedom from traders to give security to stakeholders. (Nevermind the fact that stakeholders are often the traders.) That is almost never a win. Without liberty, there is no security. Just ask any slave or dictator's subject.
Feedback 2.0 (Paris/France) is recruiting junior/senior software engineers
It's a RubyOnRails shop based in Paris, I thought it could be interesting to some HNers here.

I'm not affiliated to them, although I worked with them in the past though.

Links with full details below.
Senior eng: http://www.feedback20.com/files/jobs/Senior%20R&D%20SWEn...
Junior eng: http://www.feedback20.com/files/jobs/Junior%20R&D%20SWEn...
There are corporations in Europe too, but people here aren't as fat as in the US. Perhaps because, despite "the corporations", they do have a say in the matter and simply don't eat so much fatty garbage.
GarlicSim 0.5 released
Because the installation time is what matters in databases which are supposed to run for years (or months - depends on your environment) without restarting... I'm not even going into differences between postgres and sql server features. Flagged.

(also: why do milliseconds go only up to ~20?)
Microsoft has some amazing enterprise products. Excel is absolutely amazing. Access is a great development tool for paperwork personnel. SQL Server is so so simple to get up and running, and scale up to tremendous volume.
Erm... Not to say too much, but I'm pretty sure mathematicians would envy CS not having paradoxes.
Signed up.

Some comments: For the servers page, it would be better if we can group/sort by functions/region/instance type.
DDT was a fantastic invention for combating malaria. Great invention, terrible application thereof.
Writing everything in callback style is not nice. Why aren't they using a language with coroutines?
It's a lot more complicated than that. The human body is not a simple engine with a fixed metabolism. Even if we switch to a more variable metabolism model, simply scaling your eating to your activity will not necessarily cause you to lose weight. The body first looks for equilibrium, and then when equilibrium is a problem it will start looking into stored energy. It's not just a question of "activity x burns y calories." Some of those calories are burnt in healing - our muscles strengthen by tearing, and then healing larger. You don't eat, your body may delay that maintenance, waiting until energy is available. So you haven't actually lost any weight - you've just prevented yourself from gaining weight, which is actually a bad thing, because that muscle would make you healthier.
The semantic criteria listed in the article for defining 'disease' are not rigorous at all and rules out the following conditions that most people would agree are diseases:

Alzheimer's Disease (rule 1)

Any STD, like AIDS (rule 2)

Any pandemic (rule 3)

The Common Cold (rules 2, 3)

Scurvy, Rickets (rules 2, 6)

Also, I'm skeptical that given a clear medical definition of obesity (or more more likely, metabolic syndrome), that it would fail rule 5.
This idea might work well in Ireland since IIRC we have more cows than people. We also have a number of large data centers here and plentiful incoming bandwidth.
Well a lot i would say.

Peter norvig for starters ? I would say me if i mattered ;)
Think of it the other way too: it allows the HTTP server to start writing the file to disk without having to completely load the file into memory.
Intel Unveils New Server Chip With 32 Cores
Honest question: [...] Are obese people proliferating at a quicker pace than before?

Honest answer: Yes. Overweight females are more fertile (IIRC fertility reaches a maximum at around 30 BMI) and are more likely to decide to have children due to societal factors (they are less likely to be employed and have lower mean household income). Until recently, the second factor did not exist (the societally accepted role of women was to bear children), and the first factor was limited by affluence -- bearing more children doesn't help you genetically if the extra children die of starvation.

The above (horribly politically incorrect) comments notwithstanding, the environmental pressure in favour of "overweight" genes is a tiny fraction of what would be required to cause the observed surge in obesity over the observed timescale. We're looking at a change in environment, not a change in genetics.
And IBM does $100 billion a year in revenue and has competitors to all of those products listed. What's your point? HN has always had a startup focus - and MSFT/IBM are well out of that range.

And besides - most of those rely on one or both of Windows and Office.

Out of curiosity HN - who are the startups taking on Sharepoint? I don't think I ever hear anything good about it --- but it seems to be growing like a weed.
Wait, so if I burn 2000 calories in a day but only consume 1500 calories, I won't lose weight?

I am not arguing that it's not as simple as the 500 calorie deficit going 100% towards fat reduction, but I don't see how it is possible to not lose weight like this. Weather or not the exercise builds muscle, it will reduce mass.
Other people are doing this too, but it's still cool!

I know Neil Gershenfeld's students over at MIT are working on something like this as part of Fab Lab 2.0...
"Well, tablet is an area that will evolve going forward. Certainly it’s a focus for what we’re doing in the Windows space, and how they’re thinking that space. We’re going to have a bunch of netbooks and tablet stuff that’s in the works there. We’ll just see how that evolves."

Isn't that a lovely and inspiring statement from a tech visionary? Don't you get all tingly just reading that? (Oops, sorry, thats the circulation in my legs going out again...)

Whats wrong with most tech execs is they are waiting for something to evolve, and then hoping to jump on the band wagon. In the mean time, they are reacting by running around in circles and trying to turn the crank on the old machine faster and faster. Oh, and let's reorganize a bit. Yeah, that'll do it...

Embarrassing.

Jobs meanwhile, love him or hate him, is _making_ the next generation tech, one piece at a time. And he's making it well. And he's making it closed and proprietary.

I really wish our choices weren't between openness/freedom and quality/innovation, but that's how it sits right now.
Yes. Many. :-P

The market for rental data has two big issues--the first is fragmentation--many rental listings only appear in locally traded publications (your local classified) and for only a limited time (a few weeks). The second issue is that much of the listing data is vague--"Beautiful home in Upper East Side." Which means getting detailed current and historical information is a tough problem. It's not just a tough problem for us either--it's a tough problem for Renters!

We have so many thoughts on how to bootstrap this that it's hard to start this conversation unless you're really interested in the answer. So... as a teaser, I'll tell you that we've already started a LARGE mechanical turk campaign to seed key markets. We've also started the process of importing a number of public records that don't give us rental prices directly, but will let us create a model for what the rental prices SHOULD be--given some insight we have to traditional CAP rates (what a property should rent vs its purchase price and current interest rates--to make for a good investment).

Given those approaches do you see any other opportunities for us to bootstrap?
Let us not over-generalise when it is not needed. Italics and bold are established typographic forms, and if they are what I want let me say so exactly.
A GOP Oil Trap
We built the product from idea to implementation in 2 weeks. We decided on using CSS3 techniques liberally and rather than work on downgrading for different browsers, we spent the time making a better experience for the most compliant browsers. It is in our plans to have a downgraded experience, but thought the warning was a good apology for the time being.

Thanks for the feedback. We are in the process of expanding our data. You could have added your own information... what could we do to tempt you to?
The History of Western Civilization, by TISM:

http://www.geniac.net/tism/history.txt
Speed it up.
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You could still do that if the length was pre-announced, or am I missing something?
Another issue we're running into now (as a result of having a growing number of users) is that we're noticing that downtime on the App Engine is shockingly bad, and getting worse.

Over the last few weeks, we've seen periods of downtime pretty much daily, and serious downtime (i.e. more than a few minutes) monthly. It's grossly under-reported in the App Engine status console, which shows a euphemistic warning (which in practice might mean that all server requests will return errors.)

Our software is used in the classroom during lectures, and we've had several customers experience system failure due to App Engine downtime. On top of that we've had more than one customer demo go wrong for the same reason.

It's pretty infuriating actually, because 1. you can't do anything other than just sit there and wait it out, and 2. there is no one to talk to at Google. Finally, the problems are only getting worse.

We were going to do a slow migration out of the App Engine over the course of a few months (because we've got a ton of code to rewrite.) At this point we're doing an emergency 2 week migration with all devs pulled from their projects for the task.

I honestly have no idea why these issues aren't getting more mainstream attention, given how many people are using the App Engine. The only thing I can come up with is that there must be tons and tons of tiny non-critical projects, and very few serious startups betting their business on the App Engine.
I used to feel this way. The two people that changed my mind were John Resig and Douglas Crockford. Resig's jQuery project has been, for me, a guide to how JS should be written. Crockford's JS the Good Parts and JSLint have helped as well by providing some solid reference on what to do and, more importantly, what not to do.

Lots of folks only see the DOM and the bad parts when working with JS - these two projects have shown me there's so much more.
The Cleverest Ways to Use Dropbox That You’re Not Using