skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except people rarely die before breeding age from smoking (ever?), so no effect.
I agree, but if you buy into the idea of the legitimacy of legalized mass slaughter (war), then you believe that there are exceptions. When a country decides to go to war, people throw out all of the usual ethics and morality.In theory there are some rules to be followed (Geneva Convention, etc), but powerful and influential nations often do little more than wink at those (unless it is someone else breaking them).
Your last is one reason for the microprint on the bills. You can't upsample "into" microprint, except on CSI/NCIS type TV shows...
All that is obvious. One does not need to come from a military family to understand that. Common sense should suffice. The interesting questions are:

1) if the WikiLeaks war logs contain "nothing new" (according to the White House), then why is that it's a problem of national security?

2) yes, guys with guns must be held to the highest standard possible; unfortunately, the civilians who have the power to send the "guys with guns" to invade sovereign nations and kill people are held to no standard at all. We didn't lower the bar, we removed the bar. Zero accountability for the decision-makers, death penalty to the pawns in uniform? Isn't a rogue executive branch potentially more dangerous than a rogue Army private?

3) did Congress authorize the war in Afghanistan? I don't remember any declaration of war. If we're not officially at war, then what Rogers claims to be "treason" does not call for capital punishment.

4) if we are at war and Manning should be executed for treason, then why not execute Cheney too? Didn't he reveal classified information and endangered Americans when he exposed Valerie Plame?
Thanks. Is there an easy way to check if something's been posted earlier - especially when the URLs are different?
Ask HN: How many jobs did Obama Administration create in last 6 months?
I believe this is a good measurement of Obama's competencies.
Flipboard like personalized, local, online newspaper.
These are arguments I've already heard, and which I consider hackneyed.

One problem with dismissing the argument that downloaders would not have been purchasers is that a download count doesn't accurately reflect usage of the item. Producers cry in horror that their "content" was downloaded 100,000 times, but each user may have inadvertently been double or triple counted based on multiple computers, failed saves, forgotten file locations, or mistaken download methods (eg, view image versus save to disk).

On top of this, hoarding behavior causes people to collect things for which the perceived value (something) is greater than the cost (free / time to download). Hoarders will likely never use the item, but will show up as a download (or two or three) anyway.

Lastly, I doubt this to be the case in this situation, but artificially increasing a download count for the purpose of inflating possible damages is blindingly simple.

In short, I agree with your addendum, that anything which can be copied will be copied, and copies have nothing to do with sales unless you collect money at the point of copy. The more time spent complaining about loss, the less of a business and more of a funded hobby you are (and wouldn't we all like to have funded hobbies).
Please check my new reply here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1570167
Wikileaks posts an encrypted file as insurance
MCS (Microsoft Consulting Services) has been a business component for them for a long time. Whereas someone like IBM-GS seeks to make as much margin as they can off the services side, MCS is in the unique position of being willing to make smaller margins because the licensing revenue is significant. That attitude has been changing in the past 5 years but it is still part of the MCS culture.
Linux has had the FHS since the late 90s.

* Config files go in /etc.

* Spools, caches an so on go in /var

* Binaries for all users go in /bin if they're important, /usr/bin if they're less so

* Binaries for root go in /sbin if they're important, /usr/sbin if they're less so

The standard was mature a decade ago and long before then. I suspect you just may have not been used to the standard.
Love their podcast! I've recently joined their micropreneur academy.
Why do you need a desktop to have a web browser? ¬_¬
Insurance annuities are not as risky as municipal bonds. What's more, your state's insurance commissioner guarantees them, similar to the FDIC guarantee on deposit accounts, up to a certain dollar amount (I think it's something like $100K).

So you have $2 million in F-you money? Stick $100K each into 20 different insurance company annuities (staying below the guaranteed amount and diversifying your risk) and enjoy guaranteed monthly (inflation adjusted) checks for the rest of your life.

The only thing that will stop your income stream is the complete destruction of the entire US financial system. I suppose that is possible, but if that happens your money won't be safe anywhere, except perhaps gold bars buried in your back yard...
First, this is a dupe, it's been already on HN (via Engadget[1] as it's even linked in this article)

Second, "holycrapawesome" in the title annoys me even more than the "ginormous" in the original Engadget title (which is actually a dictionary word, apparently). Oh well, I'd better tell kids to get off my lawn or something.

1. http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/02/china-to-build-ginormous-...
Not really. Firstly, if you're going to count all Android device sales against the iPhone, you're going to also have to count all iOS devices, such as the iPod Touch and the iPad. At this point, iOS is still well ahead of Android in the US.

Secondly, the US is not the whole world. Here in France I don't know anyone other than tech geeks that have Android phones, but a majority of my friends have iPhones or Blackberries.

Thirdly, you have to take into account the fact that Apple has created a culture of users paying for content. They have also made paying for content as painless as is humanly imaginable - select item, enter password, and it downloads straight to your phone. Android devs have a long wait ahead before they start to see the returns that iOS devs are seeing.
> stop paying into your retirement fund

What is their reasoning for this point?
I'm not really a web developer, but FreeBSD might be a better fit there. OpenBSD is a great dev platform, though, and an excellent firewall.

You could run your blog stuff chrooted / in a process jail, either way.
At least one experienced prosecutor (now retired) thinks that there is a case for prosecuting Bush for murder of the US soldiers who died in Iraq:

http://www.amazon.com/Prosecution-George-W-Bush-Murder/dp/B0...
Learning Haskell has been a side project of mine the summer of two years ago, when there were a bit less tools to help newbies. Not an issue for me, since I've grown used to run code in my mind while reading it, because I firstly learned C without a computer for testing code on. I need fewer "reality checks" than more "hands on" developers (but I still throw snippets at the compiler to understand the gory details).

I think Haskell is for those mathematically oriented both because only mathematicians would have cared to wrestle with monads to achieve purity (Clean is as pure as Haskell, with no monads in sight) and because its notation, whose succintness matches that of maths.

I confess I've been scared of Haskell's heavy leaning on operators and many levels of precedence among them. I prefer more verbose languages. I'm not mathematically oriented, I think.

Have a nice day.
Solving Problems versus Selling Products
Why Obama and not Congress or the rest of the administration?
Actually, diseases are largely a result of agriculture. Hunter-gatherers were much healthier (and about 6 inches taller) than their farmer successors.
It's things like this that make me the impression that I should do the work and not the computer (the *BSD OS).
Indeed. AFAICT there's are two groups:

* People who get that creative output is creative output, and that as creators at HN we should support creation and our ability to determine who gets to copy what we make.

* There's another part who says 'digital is special' and because we use computers, anything that uses computers is somehow good and should not be stopped.
It's not so much organic meat even, as grass fed, antibiotic free, ranged fed beef, served very fresh has the same benefit.

Things such as Vitamin C decay away in the meat with the current slaughter to serving times, and the corn diet instead of the proper grass diet lead the beef to be made up of Omega 6 instead of Omega 3 fats.

Meat itself may not be perfect, but modern factory meat is horrible. Corn Fed, Trough Locked Cows are horrible for you.
I agree with you on most things but, there is a lot of clascifed information that you are not allowed to disclose. Also, you can "talk back" to your commander, but it's far more risky.

PS: O:"Go there" P:"I think I BLEEP ing see an IED." vs P:BOOM.
re: (2) What do you suggest?

re: (4) Yes he may have revealed classified information but it does not appear he endangered the lives of anyone by the revelation (you think he did?)
Do you know about drug trafficking Jacksonville
Jacksonville's Premier Criminal Defense Firm handles a variety of cases like criminal defense, drug charges as well as murder. It has the expertise and experience to deliver case altering results for clients.
That will never happen. Unfortunately, the political decision-makers are above the law. We all know that. Does anyone remember LBJ & McNamara being prosecuted for the deaths of 58,000 Americans and over 2,000,000 Vietnamese?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_witness more so than Liar's Paradox.
Idiocy, corruption and war profiteering != murder
This title appears to be knowingly misleading. Towards the end it actually goes on to say 'And cooking is what he thinks really changed our modern body'. In fact it could just have easily been cooked starchy foods that had the biggest impact in supplying more calories. Either way it was the additional supply of calories that made the difference - not some magical ingredient of meat. I guess the diet Taliban are a ready audience for a journalist without any actual original research to report on.
He probably means he's using a simple window manager (twm, fvwm, etc) instead of the fancy everything-managers that include desktop functionality.

X alone doesn't provide that -- think back to Windows 3.1 days. You had a background, but not a desktop.
A bit off topic, but with the benefit of many years of hindsight Daniel Ellsberg's leaking of classified information about the Vietnam War is widely regarded as a good thing for an open society.

I don't know enough yet about the recent Wikileaks issues to judge that, but it will be interesting in 10 years to look back and see what public consensus is.
If sharding and repliaction is a major concern, I'd also take a look at riak or cassandra. Especially as a simple key-value store, they offer more interesting balancing and error recovery features than MongoDB.
MongoDB does however have a rich data-schema and allows queries (although the necessary indexes bring up ram consumption a fair bit and might become a problem)
Window management would be required to align the web browser with the terminal windows. A text web browser wouldn't require window management but omits a lot of content.
And it is probably just as likely as Henry Kissinger being prosecuted. I'm sure that you may see the odd foreign judge or two throw out a summons for Bush, to little or no effect.
The most unlikely place to find startup funding
Yeah, I just drove through Slovenia two months ago and was bowled over - my last time through had been in 1986; it's ... very, very different now.
MailFinch: on demand direct mail (www.mailfinch.com)

NotaryCRM: simple software for mobile notaries (notarycrm.com)
Home computer is 33 today - Tandy TRS-80 was born on August 3 1977
"I’m 35 years old, and I’ve consistently contributed to retirement for the past 10 years, and so taking one year off at that point was not a catastrophic move for me. And 650 bucks a month added back into our budget was a huge deal. It allowed me to make a move earlier that I would have had to wait several months to do. Again, not something I would recommend doing forever, but it absolutely can work over the short-term."
As someone who has played competitive chess for many years, I am impressed with just how robust and reliable the elo rating system has proven to be.

A 100 point difference between two players suggests that the stronger player will score 66% ((1#wins + 0.5#draws + 0*#losses)/#totalgames) and a 200 point difference will predict the stronger player will score 75%.
> it's not clear what exactly your complaint is.

Any complexity introduced in the code increases its long term maintenance cost. I strongly suspect this is one of those cases where the performance gain will not justify the long-term effort of maintaining a more complex architecture.

I remember having a similar discussion circa 1992 about advantages and disadvantages of using ODBC versus native MS SQL/Sybase libraries. I instrumented the program I was writing and showed it spent 99+% of the time idling, 1-% of the time computing and, of that time, about 78% waiting for the database to return something. Using native libraries would yield a minuscule improvement at the cost of a huge headache.
And your research comes from...?
An Academic Rip Van Winkle
Using Sparse Files as Disks for Networked RAID
> Solaris SMF is actually one of the best things about Solaris (IMO)?

XML config files? Java when a regular Unix system language like C or Python (or Perl for older folks) would suffice?
Google begins rolling out multiple account sign-in
Perhaps this shows us that things have changed in journalism? You have to wonder if Watergate, for example, would have been reported on so vigorously had it occurred in 2010.
> The creator of a work has a right to determine who they distribute it too.

They might have a moral right, or even a legal right. But in the age of the internet, they have no practical right, since you can't in practice stop copying.

Anyone who produces an informational work today knows that if it gets popular it will be copied on the internet without their permission. If they don't like that, they are free not to create the work in the first place. But since they know what will happen (or would know, if they had any intelligence at all), it seems silly of them to complain when it does.
Genetic algorithms can be used to determine the (close to) best combination of features from all the features you have access to.
Visualization - Great empires decline
I think that's it's pretty obvious that our digestive systems are suited for meat, since we're completely incapable of digesting most plant matter.

Humans are incapable of metabolizing most of the foliage out there, whether or not we cook it, whereas we can draw nutrition easily from fruit, nuts, and even raw meat.

Our dentition patters are further evidence; we're dentally equipped as omnivores, but our dentition patters learn more towards carnivore than they do herbivore.
Seth Godin's "The Bootstrapper's Bible": Start a business with no money
Actually, the author is a very experienced prosecutor who has worked on many murder cases (including Charles Manson). He certainly sounds like he knows what he is talking about!
> anything that uses computers is somehow good and should not be stopped

Whether copying on the internet should be stopped is irrelevant. The whole point of the net is to copy vast amounts of data across the world cheaply and effortlessly. You couldn't stop this without shutting down the net. Which is impossible.
I knew this, but I always find it a rather disappointing choice in the language design, as I think its capacity for inspiring bugs rather outweighs its usefulness (which extends as far as making some parentheses unnecessary).

In a nutshell: there are two forms of the AND and OR operators, with different precedences; in many contexts, you can use them interchangeably; but in some, they'll behave differently, and could bite you.
People tell me how much they're getting. The numbers do go up to 7 figures even for rank and file engineers. But if I wrote a post about how to get that kind of money, I'd be accused of being even more cynical (I'm already accused of being very cynical when I wrote this article). Besides that kind of information should really go into the next edition of my book.

Google can and does hand out big bonuses. There's so much cash flowing through the company that a little sprinkle of it (by Google's standards) is still a lot of money. If you're one of the fast-tracked folks at Google, there is no reason to join a startup just for the money.
I met someone that was project manager of the copy/paste functionality in Visio...

edit: that was 2 years ago
Fortunately for the political class, malice can easily be disguised as incompetence. Plausible deniability makes it hard to attribute culpability.

If a mafia top dog sends his goons to invade private property, his goons get shot at and return fire and kill people, then the mafia guy is a criminal. If the commander-in-chief sends his goons in uniform to invade a sovereign nation that poses no threat to the U.S., his pawns get shot at and return fire and kill 100,000s of people, then the commander-in-chief is a national hero, and anyone who dares to disagree is a traitor, a liberal, a communist, a socialist, un-american scum. Lesson to be learned: if you want to be a criminal, avoid the private sector.
Likewise, in 1969, congressman Mendel Rivers tried to have Hugh Thompson, Jr. punished. He had outed the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam.
Wall St was right in 2000 and 2007. It was 1995-1999 and 1998-2006 when Wall St (and everyone else) was wrong (on tech stocks and housing, respectively).
> Hunter-gatherers were much healthier

But probably not smarter in the way we think of intelligence. They didn't develop civilisation, agriculturalists did.
Seriously, if you want people to listen to a 30+ minute podcast which has your question at the end of it which is answered in roundabout four minutes then you're underestimating the audience here. That's 1/16th of a normal workday gone.

Also, while in general the advice they gave makes sense it is not so general as to be applicable on a scale that warrants listening to the rest of the podcast (which imnsho contains nothing but common sense stuff).

Ask HN is also a great place to ask questions, and they really answer them.
Yeah, but there's a fetishization of "high concurrency" (being able to support a huge number of connections) rather than absolute performance.

For instance, you might have a system which has a latency of 1 second, and at a given workload, you have 10,000 connections. In the Java culture, people think you're a genius if you can increase those connections to 100,000 and increase the latency to 10 seconds.

End users, on the other hand, would be happier if you cut the latency to 0.1 seconds, but there are a lot of people who'll then think you're a loser who can only manage to handle 1000 concurrent connections.

Of course, getting that latency down is a holistic process that requires you to think about the client, the server, and what exactly goes over the wire.
just got the last beta key :) thanks!
Most OS X apps seem to have this built in. The donkey is somewhat out of the stable with auto-update on OS X, no?
I find anti-health care movement in America strange. In 50 years time it'll be political suicide to suggest removing it. Much like the 1960s civil rights acts, they were opposed at the time, but will be viewed as important by everyone in a few decades.
I used to be competent, but now I guess I avoid writing stuff that relies on any knowledge of operator precedence.

I try to learn what I can of such precedence in the language of the day, since I will have to maintain other people's "code" (cypher?), but I try to write obvious "programs" (who is in this play, what are the acts?).

I've been at this over 2 decades, and it's much easier to read something that uses a few parentheses, a well named intermediate variable or two, or even a few functions, than it is to read bunch of multiple operators on the same line gobble-de-gook. Watching somebody else generate a hundred thousand dollars of wasted product in a manufacturing preparation process a few years back, due to such a run-on if-statement being fouled up, was also a good confirmation of this bias. I'm sure my current job in finance offers similar opportunities for expensive blunders.
I get that Linux uses a different standard layout than BSD. I really do. The thing is that when I was using RedHat, years and years ago, its paths were not internally consistently.

I'm talking about that specific distro, at that specific time. Debian was much better in that regard, and I didn't look back.
Apple makes better, prettier, more integrated, etc. laptops. Welcome to 2003.
The initial argument was that investing in Europe as opposed to the US wasn't going to get you anywhere. While we could debate ad-infinitum which economy is "worse", the point stands.

It's easy to establish that Europe is in at least as bad a position as the US. Your point as to Switzerland's health points exactly to why many (including myself) think this means that it is actually worse overall: Because of the Euro, each of these problem countries can't control their own interest rate, and so the likelihood of actually defaulting is greater.

http://www.moneyweek.com/news-and-charts/economics/europes-e...
I had a similar setup to pierrefar, with each chapter a separate LaTeX file. However the whole project was in a Subversion repository. All of my papers, figures and other binaries were included in there too.

I'm not going to pretend I know much about the implications of storing huge binary files in SVN, but at least they were in VC.

The main benefit to me of this was not backup (although that was highly useful!) but in the fact that I could write it up in the Uni office, at home or on my laptop on holiday. Just don't forget to SVN commit every now and then :-)
Because he is the President. If the economy were going gangbusters, we would be giving him the credit, just as many gave President Clinton credit for the 1990s boom. President Obama is the one everyone looks to for leadership, so he is the one who gets praised or damned when the economic statistics come out every quarter.
Poll: Male or Female?
It's been over a year since a poll of this nature, and HN's landscape/size has significantly changed. I wonder if the predictions of more women coming have proved true (since the previous polls were significantly skewed toward the male gender).
There are two potential problems, one legal and one perceptual. On the legal side, you may run into trademark issues if your name isn't sufficiently different from a generic term. You can already see this problem in Apple's App Store. When you search for "flashlight", you get a lot of generically-named apps. None of them can prevent any of the others from using a confusingly similar name because they're all based off a generic term. The second problem is one of branding. It's the same basic issue as the legal trademark issue, but from a different perspective. In the end, it's about confusion on the part of your customer/buyer. Trademark attempts to use the legal system to prevent confusion. Marketing uses branding and ad-spending to achieve the same goal.
Is Human Capital the New Venture Capital?
For my current writing project, I have two editions (one for JVM languages and one for Common Lisp) so I have three directory structures: common material for both editions, JVM, and Lisp.

For each of these structures, I use:

/ - top level have Latex files

/images - OmniGraffle figure files and exported vector PDFs

/code - code snippets that are automatically included and formatted using Latex commands
Paul Graham's Investment Principles Applied To The Music Industry
logistically that works out, its just not actually a good idea