skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"In communist Russia, the ego goals might be to work in the factory in service to the state. Unfortunately, this is a really shitty goal because it does not provide opportunity for happiness."

I stopped reading here - it is a stupid generalization and a misunderstanding of the Flow concept, of people in totalitarian regimes and of people in general.

People living in communist Russia were not as naive to have as a personal goal "service of the state", just as an employee in corporate America today doesn't necessarily think of "maximizing shareholder value" the whole day (or whatever is on the bullshit bingo du jour).

In fact, the idea of Csikszentmihalyi's flow is that resourceful people can create/find meaningful activities pretty much regardless of the external environment (above some threshold) which leads to a feeling of happiness.

From what I've heared and read, communist factories were often the hotbeds of creative "hacking": given the nonsensical and weakly enforced rules, people used whatever tools and material they had available to tinker and hack together household items for their own use.
Uhhh. I think you need to study this topic some more.

> it is actually more reliable to sleep than to block. by definition blocking is unreliable because you don't know exactly when it will unblock.

A block will end when the nic can handle more data. You can't just wait a second and assume the nic can handle the data. That's where the "unreliable" part comes in. You assume it can handle the data, but you are not checking. And the way to check is either by polling, blocking, or receiving a signal. Waiting is not a way to check.

> You do know when a sleep will end though.

It makes no difference that you know when the sleep will end. It's irrelevant - all you care about is can the nic accept more data or not.

> I also want a variable delay between writes.

If you want variable delays then do that, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with making sure the nic doesn't lose data.
Common ones are
Native mobile apps: Java (Android), Objective-C (iPhone)
Web apps: Python, Ruby, PHP, Javascript
I hope that at least a few middle-aged actresses are getting a laugh out of this.

But "juvenolatry" strikes me as a barbarous coinage.
Really funny, trailer of Java 4-ever movie
They given up on MeeGo ?
At least Linode recently gave everyone a 42% RAM increase. Good point though, most of the hardware progress has been pure margin for the cloud vendors.
My tattoo artist told me that MySpace was the place to be for that industry. This was kind of interesting as I could see the appeal, but I wonder if that will fade as well as it seems to be for musicians..
Couldn't write a couple paragraphs on a blog and then link to that?

Amazon's cut prices, and the high end of their offerings have gone up. Yes, they're going to take a disproportionate share of the benefits from speed if they can get away with it. They also took all the risk on the outlay and used to charge comparatively less per dollar of provisioned hardware when they bought those chips. So I don't think they're ripping anyone off, yet.

If it becomes a bad deal, people are free to go elsewhere - likely quite easily, what with EC2's architecture.
Unfortunately, I have to disagree (and time and numbers are proving me right). Once I had the idea of scraping visitor numbers for major musicians every day in order to trace how their profile views were affected by the rise of Twitter and Facebook, but never did. It is, however, quite visible.

If you're a musician, Myspace simply doesn't give you the tools to provide your audience updates the way they want to consume them. Their twitter-like stream is limited to the internal homepage that you can see while logged in, which doesn't make sense. People want real-time and Myspace doesn't give them that.
They've offered more and more powerful instances as hardware has improved, and they offer spot pricing allowing the market to set the price for spare cycles.

Offering smaller instances is a good thing for a variety of reasons from simple cost savings when you don't need much to efficiently slicing up arbitrary hardware for embarassingly parallel compute jobs.
Linux 64-bit binary is available without filling out any forms at http://labs.northscale.com/membase/
The New Ruby Ecosystem
Noisy means there is a lot of variance in the actual time the process spends sleeping. When you say sleep(1) most OSes interpret that as saying, sleep as short as you can. Based on the scheduler internals, that can vary a lot.
I don't think this is very compelling. The example given (searching for a particular Marriott) works flawlessly in Google and I can get at much more information than Open Graph tagged sites will give me.

What problem is this solving?
The thing is, computers are not getting faster anymore.

The only thing that is changing is parallel processing. So amazon is still selling a single CPU, and that single CPUs speed has hardly changed in years.

You should get more memory and disk space though.
The reading experience is very smooth. Once mobile devices will be supported (I tried it on my iPhone despite the supported browsers list not mentioning Mobile Safari, but it's not usable there), this might be a viable alternative to native eBook software.

Great job.
Amazon lowered the price of Linux instances by 15% in November 2009 (from 10 cents/hr to 8.5 cents/hr). Source: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?ex...

If that doesn't seem like much, you also have to consider that other costs of providing the service may increase to offset hardware savings due to Moore's law. Think of the networking hardware, energy required to cool the datacenter, bandwidth, HVAC repair and maintenance, real estate, staffing, insurance. These costs are not likely to decrease at the same rate as computer hardware costs, and some, like rent and payroll actually increase.
It's an IRC daemon. Weren't half of these trojaned anyway? Most of these may as well have been written by the past equivalent of 4Chan.
I'd prefer more computing power to lower costs.
What do you mean by "discovered an effective method for human powered search that covers the whole internet?"

Their indexing seems rather easy to game. From what I understand you have to include some FB specific metadata tags to tell FB to index it and what's on the page. What's stopping someone from putting metadata tags to say it's a page for a hotel somewhere or a movie, when they are really selling Viagra?
Opera 10.60 Brings More Than Speed
It's rather naive of you to think that it would be cost effective for Amazon to completely replace it's hardware infrastructure every year.
>I stopped reading here - it is a stupid generalization and a misunderstanding of the Flow concept

Got that bit from Mihaly himself, though it's possible I took it out of context. I don't have my copy of the book with me right now but when I get home I will give you some precise quotes. The idea is that intentions and behavior are definitely shaped by the state.

>In fact, the idea of Csikszentmihalyi's flow is that resourceful people can create/find meaningful activities pretty much regardless of the external environment (above some threshold) which leads to a feeling of happiness.

Yes, and if you'd bother to read the article, you'd see that it mentioned this.
Why? Intel makes money moving chips, and two Atom-capable mobile OSs are better than one.
Can someone explain to me how this helps the Internet ecosystem?

If I were a porn site, why would I want this address? Filters, parental controls, etc. are most likely going to block the entire .xxx domain - this would limit page views.

History has shown that .com is the most popular TLD - how is .xxx going to help? It seems like an attempt to drum up registrar dollars.
My life as a square (pixel)
A second long sleep on every read or write? If this was actually happening, it sounds like it could create unheard of performance issues for any significant transfer.

Or was this not noticed because all the major frameworks like cherrypy and twisted are still using the pyopenssl wrapper?

Is there any evidence that this bugfix actually changes the performance?
amazon offers a product. people buy it. if people were concerned with getting more for their money or following moore's law, they'd buy something else. instead, people buy from amazon because they're an industry leader and have good community resources available.

moore's law is about the level of modern hardware capabilities. what servers amazon uses isn't going to affect that much.
Survey: Developers favor Apple but eye Android
Or maybe they just thought AT&T had really crap reception wherever they went?

Admittedly that's a flippant remark but I still haven't seen any indication as to what proportion of users are having the problem. It's getting press because it's Apple, not necessarily because huge proportions of users are having issues. I expect someone here will correct me if I'm wrong though.
http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/06/release-yourself-to-the-c...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1460649
Zack, don't take this wrong way, because you seemed pretty chill when we met at the meetup a while back, but this post is not even remotely close to any sort of coherent thought. It's unsubstantiated speculation, bad writing, and worse yet it's linkbait. There's a line between informal flare and lunatic raving, and its drawn somewhere in the vicinity of writing in all caps. This isn't what people come to HN for, and I'm genuinely confused as to how it ended up at #1. Sorry.
Have you ever explored EOS, the Entrpreneurial Operating System? If you haven't read TRACTION by Gino Wickman, I stongly recommend it for anyone trying to grow an entrepreneurial business.
Treating Revenue as Another Product
Having no cell phone = better work
I think there's a lot more depth to the social interactions of a party game with up to four then a video chat that only involves two. I just can't see anyone staying up from 2 am to noon on video chat, but someone with Monkey Ball and 3 friends could do this easily.
[A]fter the market broke in early 2000, the stock was trading below its cash value... I don't remember the exact details of the buyback at TheStreet.com but we started buying the stock and it kept going down. We kept buying it. But we were losing money on each buyback because we were overpaying for our own stock as it kept going down.

If you're buying a dollar bill for 90 cents, and someone offers you a dollar bill for 80 cents, you didn't lose money.

I disagree with this post. If TSCM was trading at less than net cash, a buyback meant that they were getting paid to own more of it. That's an incredible deal. Also, they did something that would gave the business a temporarily negative market value (i.e. cash plus business is worth less than cash alone)--and they thus should have invested more cash in the business? That doesn't make sense.

Either the stock market was right, TSCM was worth liquidation value, and the buyback was a way to gradually liquidate the company... or the market was wrong, the TSCM business was worth more than the stock's market price, and buying back the stock was a great move.
It's interesting that football doesn't use series of games to try to cancel out some of the randomness. It works pretty well for other sports. If two teams go to seven games, you know they are pretty well matched.

It also seems like the group stage doesn't do a good enough job of canceling out random chance. Too many ties mean that too many of the groups came down to who won the final games of the group.
You're right, initially I was just intending to say we would change to be brutish, but I think this is a more interesting comparison. I like that the Eloi use the technology but don't understand it, to the point where it is deteriorating around them.
Don't confuse an EC2 instance with real hardware. It's a convenient measure of computing resources used for billing purposes.
Primary pulmonary hypertension
Isn't it because the "pagerank" of your page increases by how many people "like" your page instead of how many other sites link to your page. This really is quite interesting because it's easier to press Like than it is to write an intelligent post with a lot of words that links to the site that you like. The downside seems that every site has to buy in and put the like button on their site, but it looks like it's already too late and there's not much choice.
With cloud computing, lower costs = more computing power. If you were running 20 instances before, with the 15% reduction in price, you can now run 23 for the same price.
If nothing else, this is the most creative waste of three pages in an attempt to bash Apple that I've seen lately.

And it's very little else. The whole section on "flow" reads like an excuse-digression to distract from the real goal of the post.
I'd say Linode are about the only people passing on the savings.

(Disclaimer: I use my linode for just about freakin' everything)
I thoroughly enjoyed the article and actually went to see if I could pick up a copy of Flow. However when I got to Amazon and saw that the Kindle edition (that I wanted) was $2 more than the print edition my experiences clashed with my ego and I went to a torrent site.
If you look at the difference in gzipped size, there is not so much difference. Is it all really worth it?
The way gzip works means that a repetitive sequence of newlines and tabs will likely be only one char in the final output.
You must be thinking of RIM in Kitchener/Waterloo. When I was at University of Toronto in the early nineties, U of Waterloo was the place to go for CS or Systems Engineering if you wanted to get hired by Microsoft.

Sooo ... it's an interesting counter-example in that it kind of supports the general argument that it's good to go where the smart and savvy people are, even if that's not just SV.
Strikes me as garbage:

A) As far as I could tell the financial instruments and entities (e.g. hedge funds) that he's got such a hate for were not what caused the recent crisis.

B) He seems to have forgotten or never learned about how the politically motivated ban on banks holding junk bonds needlessly trashed that market (for a while) and a bunch of banks, making the recovery from the S&L crash that much more difficult. Forcing banks to sell a lot of politically disfavored assets right now would probably be nothing short of disastrous.

C) Unless I read it incorrectly (very possible) there's a lot more focus on banks making profits (can't have that, now, can we? Even when they desperately need to recapitalize) instead of whatever risks they might be taking by holding these assets or engaging in these businesses.

Bottom line: revenge makes poor economic policy.
"Got that bit from Mihaly himself, though it's possible I took it out of context."

I'm curious also about the context, I'd be ready to argue against M.Cs. himself, if he really claimed that, but it would be strange, because one of his main points is that better societal conditions, higher standard of living, etc. don't make people that much happier overall, in fact you start the article with this yourself.

"Yes, and if you'd bother to read the article, you'd see that it mentioned this."

Sorry - didn't mean to sound negative. Yes, you give the example of the guy addicted to programming, unable to move on to what he would want to do instead. Incidentally a similar effect might be at work in totalitarian regimes: people are addicted to the little games they have to play to get by and are not motivated to change the system. Something like a Stockholm syndrome on a larger scale. Just speculating here :)
A friend of mine who works at Mozilla showed me this some time ago. While I like to see the innovation and spirit (as always with Aza's work), Here I think they overshot and made the problem somewhat more complicated than it needs to be. I don't understand why it would be considered an improvement to have to go to a different screen to manage tabs. Scanning a chessboard of icons/pics versus a bullet list seems like a small step backwards. I tend to believe that simplicity wins over prettiness.

I'd love to find out if Aza has done user testing with the tree-style tab approach and what feedback he got back. There simply has to be a reason why Mozilla hasn't considered that approach.

My perfect browser would do this to bridge the two worlds:

* Start out with tabs across the top.

* As soon as the tab count increases to make titles less than five-six characters, offer a popup that says "For managing lots of tabs, we recommend using the tab tree sidebar" and points to the button.

* User presses the button and they get the behavior of the Tree Style Tab extension instead of tabs at top

or it asks the same question when you start rather than waiting, so power users can put tabs on the side if needed.
Don't you mean a millisecond long sleep? I never saw a sleep function that interpreted its parameter as seconds.
Edit: Well, now I know better.
Does it mean we'll be able to run the Android SDK directly on the netbook and test apps natively instead of using a simulator that takes 10 minutes to boot and is slow like hell?

As the SDK is based on eclipse, I'm not sure the performance boost will be that impressive :)

EDIT: I have nothing against eclipse, I just haven't tried running it on a netbook
> Nobody wants to hire or work with a one-trick pony.

Your deviousness is subtle, great master.
16 months old and and she does not plan on updating it. She even links to a couple more advanced JS epub readers in a recent comment.
Exactly. Its a stunt, but not otherwise interesting.
You can argue about markets setting the prices if those prices change. I doubt the $29 price point is going to fluctuate anytime soon. Apple picked a price, not the 'market' and that's where it'll stay. Whether the market will bear it is an open question.

Pricing products can be a complicated issue and can involve more than just market forces.
already into php, js (and jquery), actionscript with mxml in flex and flashbuilder.
Programming not about apps either.
What i meant was core programming, to execute "complex algorithms".
As far as I understand it, website owners have to opt out of being indexed by Google (via robots.txt), but they have to opt in to being indexed by Facebook (by adding the "Like" button). Or am I reading this wrong?

If website owners add the Open Graph Protocol <meta> tags in the <head> of their web pages, then Google (and every other search engine) can see that information as well.
cool, I'll check the nic status before sending if I ever want to maximize throughput. But I'll probably rewrite it in C at that point too.
New Simple Java API Search Engine
Tired of Googling for Java Docs on like then searching the docs - the solution - a simple custom search engine using Google custom search
The point is that any price for an that's required as a repair kit for a defective product is too much.
Regarding losethos's message:

I'm really curious how that nonsense text is generated. Presumably it's not totally random - and perhaps "Incurable" and "Pays the bills" are frequently queried search terms. I wonder what else went into that algorithm. At the same time - what's the point of a post without a url?
In The World: Easy on the eyes
_"Creativity is uncomfortable. It is their dissatisfaction with the present that drives them on to make changes."_

Guess a lot of entrepreneurs feel the same way. Not saying, that everyone who starts a small business is a genius, but I think most people who do, feel uncomfortable in "normal" society. Otherwise why would they risk it all, while eating cheap food and working a lot more than at a 9 to 5?

I read the biography of van Gogh. He was in constant mental pain (based on his letters to his brother) and did not fit in anywhere. He tried learning math (if I remember correctly) 18 hours a day, also tried being a dedicated pastor, etc. He just did not fit in anywhere, until he started painting and drawing. Of course, he didn't fit in the mainstream painting trends either, but I don't think that matters, because the mental discomfort would not have stopped even if he got rich or famous.

Also Dali has wrote a diary, which I heard about before. I will definitely pick it up at the library and read it.
MySpace's strong area is still in bands and artists. Myspace should have freemium CMS tools so that these artists can have their own domain with interactivity similar to the way Ning encourages you to roll-you-own social network.
It's still easy to game, because there's no "dislike" button. Show 50% of your visitors a really valuable awesome page, and the other 50% the viagra spam. You'll get a ton of "likes" from the awesome page, and hence a lot of traffic for the spam.
TL;DR version: The wrong self-expectations create disappointment and lead the weak to substance or self-help book abuse.

Edited: Or to buying an iPhone.
It does on Linux, from `man 3 sleep`:

http://paste.pocoo.org/show/229678/
Both the POSIX sleep() program and the sleep(unsigned int seconds) function in unistd.h interpret the argument as seconds.
Sure, but couldn't all the spammers band together and "like" each other's pages? Or set up a bunch of dummy accounts to like their own pages.

Plus I'm not too sure about the types of pages that will get liked and indexed. I haven't logged into Facebook in a ages, but I don't remember people liking or sharing links for things that I would ever use a search engine to find. But that could just be me.
http://www.virginmobileusa.com/mobile-broadband

It's mobile broadband without the commitment since it's Virgin Mobile (it runs on Sprint's network).

Plans are $20, $40, and $60 for 30 days access. You can always buy the usb stick, and then purchase connectivity only when you need it, with no monthly commitment.

If you want a mobile hotspot - may I also suggest this for plugging in the Virgin Mobile Broadband2Go USB stick.

http://www.amazon.com/Cradlepoint-PHS300-Personal-Hotspot-Bl...
When I read the title for this, I was thinking that is was going to be talking about how iDevices free up time for getting bogged down in technical details - so you can create more, so you can get into the state of flow. But it wasn't about that. I'm rereading it again. It's good to get your ideas on paper.
Another feature of gzip which may be your life-saver is that it keeps a record of the original size so you can know it without decompression.

xz format seems to have this feature, but:
$ xz --list
xz: --list is not implemented yet.
What is a Discussion Essay?
Writing a discussion essay may be challenging, but it is also stimulating. In order to write a discussion essay you need to firstly, understand what it is. A good discussion essay will provide information in a critical manner through sound analysis regardless of the reader’s opinion. With knowledge of how to write one you will be able to submit a good essay.
I don't necessary agree with this post. Many m1 hosts have been upgraded from the original Opteron 2218 hardware to Xeon E5430. In the US East region you may still end up getting an m1.small 2218 though. EC2 fixes CPU allocation, so you won't get very good performance on an m1.small... 1 ECU just isn't designed to provide much compute power (1-1.2 GHz) With spot pricing, you can get small instances for typically about $0.04/hr which is reasonable if you just need a simple web server (EC2 gives you 100 Mb/s+ uplink and generally very good bandwidth & low latency).

The newer m2 instances use x5550 Nehelem hardware and perform quite well. You'll generally get the most compute power for the money with an m2.xlarge instance (6.5 ECUs) which generally performs much better than the supposedly 20 ECU c1.xlarge Xeon E5410 instance. m2.xlarge can generally be had for around $0.17-0.30/hr (spot pricing) which is very reasonable for 17GB ram (compare to Rackspace Cloud $0.96/hr for 16GB cloud server running on less powerful Opteron 2374 hardware).

If you are interested in other providers, I've done a complete specs/performance/price analysis of 20 different cloud providers including EC2 here:
http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchma...