skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Obviously anyone's recommendations are going to tell you as much about that person's philosophical preferences as about the actual books. We might be able to do better if you told us more about your own interests and prejudices. Anyway, here are a few recommendations:

Ethics and (technical questions about) personal identity: "Reasons and persons", by Derek Parfit. Quite heavy going, but Parfit's an outstandingly clear thinker and there are some very good ideas here.

Applied ethics: "Living high and letting die", by Peter Unger. Argues for the counterintuitive conclusion that basically all of us in the affluent West have an obligation to do (not just somewhat more but) vastly more for the least well-off.

Philosophy of religion (from a definitely atheist perspective): "The miracle of theism", by John Mackie. Quite dense, but well written, clear and mostly fair. Much much more seriously intellectually than any of the recent "New Atheist" books.

Philosophy of mind, epistemology, ethics, decision theory, philosophy of physics, many other things: "Good and Real", by Gary Drescher. "A breathtakingly original assault on all the Big Issues!", says Daniel Dennett, and he's right.

Recommended on just about any topic: the "Oxford Readings in Philosophy" series of anthologies. Each volume consists of a lengthy introduction followed by somewhere on the order of 10 important articles from the primary literature. Generally very approachable and well selected.
Dell: 90% of data is never read again
>computers gets cheaper per unit each year but if you want a computer now you still buy one (as many people do). In fact, you may just end up buying one now AND in a year as they keep getting cheaper.

That's supply side deflation of a specific industry, which isn't harmful. It's a isolated thing. (And a good thing)

The "other type" is when the entire economy does it because there isn't enough money. That's a horrible thing and what happened in the Great Depression. (This is often called "Bad deflation" while the industry getting better at making things version is called "good deflation")

> taking a vacation right now might be worth an extra $50 bucks

In the specific case, yes, but in the general case, everyone spends less money in deflation than in inflation, as it is an investment. This includes businesses, which eventually turns into laid off staff.

>3. If people stop investing their money they might save it instead. Why assume that saving money is bad?

Savings (as opposed to investment) past a certain point is bad. It causes more deflation, as it pulls money out of circulation, which further causes a drop in prices. The Great Depression was a time of lots of savings for those who had cash. All this currency coming out of the economy caused more deflation, etc.

Remember, as a thing becomes more rare, it's value goes up. As more money is saved, it's value goes up for everyone (aka more deflation occurs).
The US should allow bankruptcy judges to partially invalidate mortgages, gently reducing the value of homes.

As it is now, foreclosures vs overvalued real homes means we have a hideous home buying landscape out there now.
Interesting, and potentially useful. However:

"All stores support key expiration, but only memcache supports it natively. All other stores
emulate expiration." Redis doesn't support volatile keys??

Also, does it allow access to a DB's tuning parameters? It makes a great difference whether to use Tokyo's B+ tree database or its hash database ...
skyagent == air marshal?
The problem is precisely that in most places, we are not all rights holders in respect of other people's work, even having paid for it. Contrary to the title of this discussion, there is no such thing in US law as "fair use rights", for example: fair use is an "affirmative defence", which legally speaking is not at all the same thing. And, for all the problems with its copyright law, the US approach to defining fair use is one of the more sensible and balanced ones in the western world, with many countries not nearly so open about what is allowed (hence increasing calls to change the law to be more realistic in the UK, for example).

So perhaps it would be clearer to say: it's about time someone made us all rights holders when we've paid good money for access to certain content.
Except Gustavo is wrong in that he has to convince Brett that free threading is a Good Thing. Part of Brett's post was we already know that - but we're not willing to sacrifice backwards compatibility for it, and we do not have/have not thought of any good solutions to fix it.

So having people say "this sucks you guys should fix it" 100x a day, with increasing levels of "you owe me" or "you suck" tone in their voices is depressing and frustrating.
You don't think everyone spending less money on everything is a real problem? You don't think people buying fewer cars, computers, software, video games, ipods, houses and groceries is a bad thing for the economy?

When just holding your money makes it more valuable, people do that like crazy.
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Backing up my entire hard disk so I can shift to Ubuntu from Windows, all necessary because virtualenv doesn't play nice with Windows.
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The two of you are looking at their success from opposite directions. You're looking Google from day zero and asking, "Why were they successful at all?" The first answer looks at their mammoth success and asks, "How did they avoid becoming a smaller company as they grew?" The answer isn't as simple as the initial design of Google, or how they managed investors. They took hundreds of great small steps in the beginning that made them number one. Cultural ones, such as free food, "don't be evil," and hiring the best people. Technical ones, like BigTable, MapReduce, the Google File System, and their obsessive focus on operations. Business ones, like the terms of their IPO and their managing of VCs. And entrepreneurial ones, like 20% time, acquiring lots of startups, and awarding employee bonuses by product usage. "In the early days" is a fuzzy measure, but these are all decisions that Google has made to continually grow their company in value
For the record, I'm not advocating it as good policy. I'm just disputing the idea that a completely avoidable hazard is a human rights violation.
One important thing to realize is that in a credit bubble the price of things like houses, college education, etc increase even as the supply rapidly increases. This is because there is more and more credit available to pay for them from the same constant income stream of the consumer. This increase in credit is caused by the lowering of lending standards and interest rates.

This credit is payed for by a continuous stream of income. Once the stream of income is fully tapped and debt service becomes around 30% of income, credit can no longer grow and a deflationary cycle gets going where the prices of those goods that were inflated by credit revert to the prices that they would have commanded had the supply of those goods (housing,education,etc) just been increasing and not the money supply.

The "deflation" is the business infrastructure built around constant expansion of debt collapsing. In the end it is healthy as the economy was unreasonably warped towards over-production of credit secured assets. This warping is what has led to the current underconsumption of house-poor and student-loan poor individuals who are unable to spend because they sold their productive years, in the form of debt payments, to the dream of making it rich by overpaying for credit inflated goods.

WHEN DOES THIS END? This ends when we reach the end of the K-Wave and prices come back down to levels where the cap rate on renting a house competes well with risky bonds. Even then, you've got the whole multitude of debt laden consumers who need to default on everything so they can have some spending money again. Unfortunately they are not yet out of the woods as higher taxation by our government, in order to pay its debts, is still an on-going problem that will overhang the economy until the massive bulge of government pensioners of the baby boomer era start to die-off and we end the Iraq/Afghanistan wars.
> (also pacifism is neither extreme nor wrong)

I think there was a little miscommunication there.

DavidW wrote

> [My daughter] doesn't have such extremist political views ("pacifiers for all!" is probably the most controversial).

I'm pretty sure he was talking about one of those false nipple things that you stick into a baby's mouth in order to soothe it, e.g.: http://www.google.com/images?q=pacifier

I think I've heard this called a "dummy" in UK-English, and I often hear them referred to by various brand names.

I don't think DavidW was trying to make a political comment, he was just making a little joke about his infant daughter, or at least I assume so.
Happy Birthday Apple. App Store Turns Two
The Myth That Without Gov't Subsidies, Discoveries Will Be Hidden By Secrets
I never had this problem; we use python threads heavily at work - they're all I/O bound and they work just fine. We switch to multiprocessing when it's CPU bound. Works pretty well.
I also recommend them. I used their free one for the admin area of the SaaS Rails Kit, mentioned in another reply. :)
In this specific regard, the future looks bright. If the current party's candidate wins, we can expect the same US-defying (not always rational) stand. If the leading opposition candidate wins, he was the health minister who went against Big Pharma's patents.

Serra's (the opposing candidate) stand on free software bothers me a bit, but we hope he can be properly educated.
When I said perception problem, I don't mean to say that there there isn't a problem. I totally agree about that. I think everyone who is watching is in agreement on that. I was speaking more about the debate between inflation vs. deflation. Soros is warning about deflation here but my perception of the political pressure has been that governments need to tighten in and spend less. Unemployment is on the rise but the idea that government can come in and be counter-cyclical is politically taboo.

Overall, I think this whole topic is crazy complex and one where your instincts are probably wrong. I was simply picking on a small point that I don't think the evidence shows markets are warning about inflation, it's pundits and politics that are doing that.
Some configuration details would be nice. What storage engine was used for MySQL, for example? MyISAM only supports table-level locking (and thus one-at-a-time inserts), so I wouldn't be surprised if (assuming MyISAM was used for this test) InnoDB was faster for a test that involves pure concurrent insertion.

Otherwise, as others have noted, benching the connection time is unrealistic.
JSON parsing in Python
Here's a silly/naive suggestion from someone who only casually visits reddit (read: not often to know exactly what is causing the downtime): why not make the source code behind the more problematic functions available and let us make suggestions? If not source code, then detailed descriptions?

I'd be interested in helping optimize your pain points, as I'm sure many here and on reddit are. Yes, you'll get quite a ton of trash from people who have no clue by doing this, but maybe you'll get some smart pointers in a way that doesn't require you to get a new engineer spun up in six months (which, IMHO, seems far too long for a web product)
Reddit has long-running jokes mocking the idea of paying for websites. The backlash to being asked to pay for anything on the internet would be massive. Strange, because you'd think a community of programmers would appreciate what the engineers do.
Good to know it's not just me. (Chrome dev 6.0.458.1 and Safari both no-go on OSX 10.6.4.)
The Gays Must Go
Yes, but you still dicked up the quote. Footnotes and mothers are not synonymous, much to the relief of both.
I'm not a very heavy user of Python, but I have used it for a few projects. I've never hit the need to have multiple threads in a Python project, but I wonder:

Is the GIL that much of a bottleneck? Isn't the multiprocessing module and its locking primitives enough for most work where CPU-bound processing needs to be distributed over multiple cores? When that fails can't that part of the software be done in C with Python as a wrapper language?

I see people here complaining about how the GIL limits their use of Python for serving requests and whatnot. Stuff that looks like the canonical example of something that can be solved by a multi-process module.

But I also see people complaining about stuff that is really CPU-bound, without seeing them state that they already overcome the main problem with this stuff, which is making them (theoretically) parallel in the first place.

I'm from an unix background, where threading is as heavy (or as lightweight) as multi-processing. Maybe much of the complainers come from Windows, where the equivalent of fork is very heavy compared to threading. Maybe the problem is under Python, and not really the GIL.

I'm not saying that the GIL is not a problem. But if it hasn't been removed yet, maybe the problems that come from removing it are even worse.

And Python isn't the only tool around. You can combine languages in a single project...
> I will probably give it another shot, most likely not anytime soon.

If you stopped reading it after 25 pages, you never gave it a shot in the first place. It's 464 pages long, for Pete's sake!
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Well except for the anti-cheating parts the reddit source is open: code.reddit.com.
I hate to love J Cal, the guy is just entertaining. The guests are mostly high profile. I also like TWIVC.
I looked into this but does it degrade well for non-flash users?
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+ Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility James P. Carse
+ Thus Spoke Zarathrusta Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
aslam11111_111111@yahoo.com
aslam4444_4444@yahoo.com
That's a crappy list. It's long and it mostly rhymes, making it very easy to miss or misplace a stage.
kabir.hossen@rocketmail.com
aslam666_666@yahoo.com
taanu_t@yahoo.com
fari_ala2002@yahoo.com
You do realize the Reddit source code is available, right? http://code.reddit.com/
a5555555555555559270@yahoo.com
They could have been a spammer as well and had their account blocked for that reason.
I used to flag articles that are poor/misleading, but nothing ever happened, so I stopped bothering.
I believe sanj means "Carma".
This is what MAID is for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_array_of_idle_disks
Care to explain what real-world problems you had with the GIL?

I am usually the first guy to say the GIL must go, but, quite frankly, I have learned to make Zope+Plone and Django stacks scale without messing with it. If you have a 32-core server and you want to serve, say, a Zope site, just use ZEO (ZEORaid, perhaps) and 31+ ZEO clients behind your Varnish cache.

The GIL must go, but the fact the very clever people who have tried to make threading nicer have tried to get rid of it and failed indicates this is not an easy problem.

It's not about getting rid of the GIL. It's about getting rid of it without breaking compatibility with the mountain of modules written in C there are - and that experience little or no GIL problems by themselves.

And, mind you, we are talking about CPython, the canonical implementation. IIRC, neither Jython nor PyPy have the same kind of multi-core performance problem. I am not sure, but if you write your performance-critical module in RPython and then compile it into C, you won't have many GIL problems either.

While the GIL is the biggest problem I can see in CPython, for most usage scenarios, it's not a big one.
For the anal-retentive among you. It would be footnotes and children are not synonymous. Not footnotes and mothers. Philosophy generates science. Western philosophy is a footnote. Your transitives are mixed up.

You can generalize and say "philosophy and science are derived from Greek works, which are still relevant" and help this guy out, or we can play word games. I could give a shit what the actual quote was. My goal wasn't to impress the guy with my knowledge of quotes, it was to offer a recommendation.
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You don't seem to really trying.
You could be moving everything to one host and still be saving money.
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http://dataincubator.org/

Datasets about some Canadian cities:

http://www.toronto.ca/open/datasets/web-map-services/

http://data.edmonton.ca/

http://data.vancouver.ca/
How to use Open Source Software to make Animations
I like Jean Baudrillard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
The innovation gap
This is exactly how I work with Clojure. Emacs is not required to develop in Clojure.
I am using cygwin on windows, and so far virtualenv running just fine
Weird, I've talked to clients who weren't able to load their test dataset into CouchDB, it was so slow. Sorry, but the specifics are under NDA. They actually are for real, but what kind of argument is that?

Standing on the shoulder of giants? So if another database was written in C which was invented by K&R, more famous than Joe Armstrong, should ppl use that? Can I have some of the stuff you're smoking?
This is a great place to look for several IDE's and guides to getting started with VIM.

http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/clojure/Getting_Started
$2 / mo: reddit gold badge

$6 / mo: + reddit.com email redirector

$12 / mo: reddit username appears in different colour on pages.

asking for one off donations isn't a business, you want predictable revenues. I'd pay $12/mo for reddit.

I think Reddit should contact a PE firm and do a buy out. They can't monetize because they don't have the resources.
Sensitive Payments in the International Arena
Reading a non-fiction book is an investment of time and energy. 25 pages in to the book and the author didn't even begin to address the point of the book, which was a big turn-off for me, I have never read a book that just talks about random stuff for the first 25 pages or so. I thought it was a very weird way to start off a book.

I am sure its a decent book, or there wouldn't be so many fans out there, so I will give it another try.
Hi, I'm an ABD philosopher.

The deepest and most interesting philosophical books are generally difficult and best accompanied by some form of instruction. This is true regardless of how clearly (e.g. Plato) or esoterically (e.g. Kant) written they are. There are some good secondary sources that can help but it's far preferable to be able to talk to an expert in a one-on-one or smallish setting. It would take a long time to explain why this is the case, so I'll just leave it as an assertion here.

Okay, that being said, I wouldn't want to dissuade anyone from reading philosophy on their own. Here are some recommendations for books and articles that can be (more) fruitfully read on one's own. Anything marked with a + is a secondary source. Ideally I'd be giving you excerpts from each of these in a reader for a course. I'm going to skip some people like Aristotle who should be approached in carefully selected excerpts or with a guide, and also some more obvious things that almost everyone with a college education has read, like Descartes' Meditations or Plato's Republic.

On Fate, Alexander of Aphrodisias

+ Problems from Locke, Mackie

Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza

+ The Courtier and the Heretic, Stewart (on Spinoza and Leibniz)

Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant

Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Kant

On Liberty, Mill

"Modern Moral Philosophy", Anscombe

"What is Capitalism?", Rand

The Bounds of Sense, Strawson

+ "Rawls on Justice", Nagel

"The Naturalists Return", Kitcher

Sources of Normativity, Korsgaard

This crowd in particular might be interested in some of Frege's work as well, e.g. "What is a Function?" and "Sense and Reference."
I think none of the answers in that summary really say it. Google won (in the beginning) because:

1. It *just* searches. Really well.
2. Ad auctions.

That's basically it.

It's the same way Starbucks won in the beginning:

1. *Just* coffee. Tasty coffee.
2. Charge for it.

Or Apple:

1. *Just* the user experience. A great one.
2. Charge for it.

(Google, Apple, and Starbucks have now all diversified widely, with mixed results).
3G 32GB. Love it. I take it almost everywhere instead of a laptop. Great for surfing, e-books, even a little code. Makes my Blackberry look like a pathetic piece of @(%&@#.
Mmh

"In fact, the research phase of this project took longer than the batch processing itself. That was clearly time well spent."

I'm not so sure about this. A sufficiently parallelized but otherwise unresearched script could have been created in a fraction of the time. So you would just generate the correct thumbnails on new uploads and then let the batch job run for, say, two weeks. That naive approach will take you around a days worth of development time.

The time you gained by doing it the naive way you then put into the rewrite of that legacy component that prevented you from on-the-fly generating the images.

What you have done here is, IMHO, wasted time in a legacy solution and you wasted hardware resources for storage of the additional pictures of which probably only a minority will actually be seen anyways.

Don't get me wrong: I'm sure you had a lot of fun and there's little more exciting things than seeing your code perform magnitudes quicker than the initial approach. But in the context of your quote, I have to disagree.

Unless there's more background you didn't tell us about.
Yes there are competitors but I'm not quite sure that the sites you mentioned are that. I Believe what http://www.Reputely.com is wanting to do is more similar to http://www.BunchBall.com and my startup http://www.IActionable.com. Basically something called 'Game Mechanics as a Service'. Where the service provided are achievements, rewards and points for your existing applications. http://www.BigDoor.com seems to have focused on the Virtual Currency aspect of Game Mechanics.

Sites like http://www.levlr.com, http://www.epicwinapp.com, http://www.kuwest.com and maybe http://www.badgeville.com (not sure) don't seem to be this at all. They seem more like twitter apps with points attached. These systems are based on the 'honor system' since you can't really prove anyone did anything.

There seems to also be a breed of service that is somewhere in between. Where your application does the hard work of determining when a user has earned the points or reward and just tells another service to 'store' that. Our startup originally went down this road but HN quickly gave us feedback and said they didn't like the idea of sites doing all the hard work and then just letting someone else store that reputation data. Now we are more similar to BunchBall in that we actually provide a configurable rule engine which awards the items to your users for you.

I think its interesting to see so many companies 'go public' all at once. Like dwynings says on his blog, other companies coming out just validates the market. Now its time to actually deliver something. :)