skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In fact, my personal prescription for where we are right now is for a significant return of power to the states. Some things have to be national-scale policy, but the list is much shorter than you think. We don't need a national-scale health care plan. Many of our states are larger than European countries that manage. State plans already exist. We don't need national agreement on any given social issue. If we weren't centralizing all our power, we wouldn't have to spend so much time arguing what the central policy should be.

I think you actually underestimate the complexities here. The problem isn't number of people -- you're correct, many states are as large as European countries. However, the states don't have nearly as much self-governing power (as granted by the Constitution) as European countries. In things like healthcare, this makes a big difference. For example, one of the biggest benefits to the federal government is that it can temporarily run a budget deficit during hard times. There are innumerable times (including now) when that would be necessary for a large swath of public services. It would require a rather huge change in federal law in order to make this work on the state level. Another problem you would get is massive problems with the full-faith-and-credit clause. All in all, it may be worth considering that, accounting for modern high-speed transportation and intercommunication and trade, strong states may be an antiquated idea.

Right now, for better or worse, our government is more liberal than our population

That's difficult to argue. Notably, consider that one person's vote in Wyoming counts 67 times more than a Californian's in the US Senate and 1.264 times a Californian's in the House of Representatives.
ECNs do trade matching, which is very similar to bank transactions in that it requires synchronized, transactional processing. You've got huge lists of bids and asks that are matched as quickly as possible. I know engineers who work(ed) on Archipelago, now known as NYSE Arca. It's UNIX-based, first Sun and now Linux. There are no mainframes at all. These aren't particularly impressive boxes or a ton of them either. The software is fast and well architected.

NYSE also apparently unplugged their last mainframe in 2008[1]. It appears NASDAQ OMX's INET trading platform is based on x86-64/Linux/Oracle stack on commodity hardware[2]. NASDAQ's US exchange has a record of 194,205 orders per second[3]. The latest VisaNet peak message rate I could find was from 2008 and was 8,442 transactions per second[4]. Based on the fact that Visa aggregates transactions over hundreds of major banks, I would guess that each individual bank processes less credit card transactions. Visa's 2009 volume was 9.0 billion transactions[5]. I couldn't find anything substantial on NASDAQ's stock market order volume, but NASDAQ does about 10 billion contracts/year JUST in US & European option derivatives[6].

[1] http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142...

[2] http://www.nasdaqomx.com/digitalAssets/66/66992_genium_inet....

[3] http://www.nasdaqomxtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=inet

[4] http://investor.visa.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=215693&p=irol-n...

[5] http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/credit-card-indu...

[6] http://www.nasdaq.com/aspx/company-news-story.aspx?storyid=2...
Exactly. In particular, it sounds like they've revamped the manufacturing process a bit to take advantage of modern techniques. This new process will probably be the new patent, rather than the glass formula.
Our goal is exactly the opposite: We want to make the hiring process more human.

The current job market is definitely a slog for non-engineers (somehow the market for engineers has remained strong). We'd like HireHive to be a way for people like your wife to be able to stand out from the crowd.

I'm in contact with a good number of companies that are hiring. I'd be happy to pass her info along if there's a good fit. Email me at nick [at] hirehive.com.

I appreciate your blunt feedback.
Ben Horowitz: Taking the mystery out of scaling a company
Interactive Voronoi diagrams in WebGL
Nice site. Still a bit to do but looks nice, easy enough to use etc. You asked for thoughts on pricing. Unless you can get write-ups in wedding magazines (in my experience they should give you a wedding magazine when you buy the engagement ring because that is the first thing the girl buys after the proposal!) then you are going to struggle to get people to part with money without some level of trial, but 7 days might be enough.

Then a charging structure based on a wedding might be best, $50 for a wedding (especially if you can demonstrate the ability to save time or money) would seem very reasonable. Personally too much more would seem a bit steep but I might just be tight. Monthly would obviously seem better as a revenue generator, but doesn't feel right to me - this is supposed to be a once off event - even if it is the third time!

Some thoughts on site:
1. On Signup "Who are you" default who you are should be Bride. You may also want to include Mother of Bride in the list.
2. Timezone - why?
3. When - using US Date. Huge market for this outside of US. Either work out dates from browswer or dd-MMM-yyyy. UK market you'd have to make some changes as they divide wedding into 3 parts (church/ceremony, food, dancing) but it would still be useful as is.
4. Expenses - no total
5. Expenses - possibly you want a flag for provisional and actual - catering supposed to be 50 a guest x 100. 90 guests confirm so actually only 4500 and probably confirmed a few weeks before date
6. Guests - nice flow,liked that you didn't have to enter too many details, because I wouldn't enter much. Maybe make it more obvious they only have to enter a name

Looks good, wish I could have set my wife up in this when we got married. Good luck.
The fascinating thing with the luxury watch companies is, once these were serious tools. I think that's a Rolex Submariner in the article, well once upon a time, if you were a diver, that was just a part of your gear, like your depth gauge. The Royal Navy even issued Rolexes to enlisted men. It was never meant to be a status symbol. If you were an airline pilot, you got a Rolex GMT Master with your epaulettes.

The radical shift in markets came about because the Swiss traditional watchmakers couldn't compete with mass-produced Japanese quartz (despite the quartz movement being invented in Switzerland). But with the exception of those encrusted with bling, expensive watches all need to have provenance to be sellable. Rolex with their Submariner, Omega with their Speedmaster (still NASA's standard-issue watch, BTW), and so on. That's what authenticity is here - a link to the past - selling traditional values to people who've grown up in a society where everything is disposable.

But don't ever wear a Panerai.
congrats guys, you guys have a great product, glad to see the news.
Nginx or Apache?
Yet so far the UK coalition government has been (in my and most of my friends view) quite alot better than either Conservatives or Labour would have been alone.
The servers are the same with the same IP's. We had back-links and they are slowly migrating to our new domain.

The 301's are working correctly as we've checked with a few different tools to verify. We can click on our old links in google and verify that the page comes up to the redirected domain.

The thing that really strikes us as odd is how quickly the other domains appeared but our main domain at .com has still not shown up.

This is very concerning since there is essentially nobody to follow-up with at Google.

I should also mention that Yahoo and Bing have picked up the change just fine.
Congrats to Rapportive! They are awesome, especially when it comes to help other developers to build on their platform.
I use blogger and have different blogs for different topics:

1. general (general tech, Java, Lisp, and a little on economy and politics)

2. artificial intelligence

3. Ruby

4. Clojure

I like keeping things separate, and my thinking is that if a reader is only interested in, for example Ruby, then they don't have to skip over everything else.
Also available in Netflix Streaming, if you happen to have that and can't get to that site, which is showing difficulties for me.
Stealthy Gov Contractor monitors US ISPs, worked with Wikileaks Informant [Lamo]
MGSplitViewController for iPad
Ditto. This strikes me as great for extroverts and terrible for introverts.
There is a step by step procedure on the blog of Matt Cutts about moving your site to a new web host/server.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/moving-to-a-new-web-host/
SpringPad has a pretty nice "App" for wedding planning:

http://springpadit.com/

It is probably not as robust as what you offer, but it suited me pretty well: contacts, RSVP,reminders, gift tracking, seating and vendor listing.
literally crushing it
Our business deals with content that is regional so each domain deals with data that is available only in that region. Therefore we have no duplicate data amongst the different domains. We've tried very hard to always walk a straight line regarding how are site is viewed by the search engines.
I already try to get transcripts/notes from interrogations^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hinterviews for this very reason. 90% of the information in 1% of the time (for a live interview, with hassle) or 10% of the time (for watching a recorded video/audio).

It's actually sort of good for marginal candidates, though -- if it costs me much less to interview 100 vs. 10 people, I might look over a lot of people who would get rejected at an even earlier stage otherwise.
"To reiterate, I typed q0df"f(d$j0q50@0 and my problem was solved with little thought."

Cool. The same thing can be accomplished in emacs with something like:

C-x (
M-z
C-s
(
C-b
C-k
C-u 50 C-x e

It's 19 characters against yours 16. And it can be reduced if you use F3 and F4, like someone noted. And, naturally, you can also edit emacs macros
This is Timeline-X: Positive, Passionate, People
Please notice a frontend coder is not a user experience designer. So having good design skills is not necessary to work as a frontend coder.
Things you can easily read on the beach:

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.

Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain (but read Kitchen Confidential first if you haven't already).

Also recommend FiveBooks.com, which does interviews with various academics and "thinkers" each recommending 5 books on a particular subject. It's a bit slanted towards politics but has a fair bit of hard science as well.
I'm getting married in a month so I'll try this out :) The planning process has been a nightmare, to say the least. We relied on google docs for 99% of it.
No. I've spent far more of my working life puzzling through OO in C to want to inflict it on others. But I've also become a fair to middling C programmer, and the strength I bring to that task has a much to do with knowing how to build large systems in a comprehensible way from the elements the language exposes, as it does to a basic knowledge of those elements. I.e. knowing how to code a case statement isn't the same as building a 50x400 state machine that's efficient, robust and debuggable.

I suspect the same is true of the skills and knowledge held by an experienced C++ hacker.

So I suspect that the C++ FAQ, and the Sutter book are just the ticket.

thanks

c
No, you are being extremely vague. A GPU only performs well at executing a small set of mathematical instructions in a very specific, ultra-parallelized model against limited sets of data. They are not Von Neumann machines. A mainframe runs business software on general purpose CPUs with a normal memory model. It wasn't long ago that Macs and IBM mainframes shared the same CPUs. Yes, they support virtualization in hardware, but so do cheap Intel processors now. They appear to be architecturally no different than large SMP boxes. Please enlighten me on the key hardware differences that make them so apt for transaction processing.
It's also performant enough that it wasn't worth the time to learn a faster performing language.
Not a fan of Taleb, who is in love with the sound of his own voice, and who is articulating concepts that may be shocking to pit traders but not so much to anyone who has spent quality time on Usenet.
It does seem like a false dichotomy. Sure, it's just fiction, but doesn't Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" illustrate how fiercely independent space colonists could work together to survive and even thrive?

TANSTAAFL != Anarchy
I am married. Would it be insane if I just became a father for the first time a few weeks ago?! I wouldn't be looking to formally start something until early next year though.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that my spouse would have a big say in this too.
The Giants Trilogy if you've never read it is fun.

Heinlein's The moon is a harsh mistress.

The web mage series is well... horrible, but like a train wreck hard to look away from. I mean few books rival plan 9 from outer space.

I have yet to read the lady with the dragon tattoo, but the movie was amazing so I look forward to that.

How to catch squirrels was a good read.
SaaS and Cloud Questions of the week 02/08
Good to hear. I've been to one BarCamp at Waterloo, about 20 people there, but the presentations were fairly technical. Reinforcing all my beliefs. Glad to hear it is developing though.
Here's the video: http://blip.tv/file/3871726
If they'll let you start a business just like that, but won't let you live there, can you just run your business abroad, over the Internet then? That's what I'd like to do anyway.
I agree that one of the major problems with the Android Market at present is certainly this culture of "I won't pay for an app -- and if I have to pay, I'll copy it to my SD card and delete it within the 24 hour return window."

I haven't seen any evidence that piracy on Android is worse than on iOS. My paid app has a 5-10% return rate; even if that's all piracy, it's not worth worrying about.
Yes they do it but I just question how viable a company is that relies on blocking ads to display their data.
> "Can't" is not at issue here - with enough effort, anyone can do just about anything. The question is whether it's actually worth the effort.

Perhaps I should have said "with little effort", then. If you can't setup a system with just little effort, you are not skilled enough as a programmer. See, Ewjordan, I understand your frustration. I've had my share with setting up "newbie-hostile" systems, and you know what? As a consequence, I now understand better how things work, and I can setup whatever system faster. I have "graduated" from Ubuntu to Debian user, I now use Emacs as my only editor, and so on. Little improvements... Still learning. Oh, and I'm faster at tracking down and fix issues which I or my coworkers stumble upon.

> A smart programmer will pick whichever one gets up and running the quickest so that he can actually see what coding is like in that language, as opposed to configuring/installing/compiling sources/tracking down a supported version/etc.

Would we really call her a smart programmer? A street-wise programmer maybe. Being such a programmer could be your goal? That's fine. Have fun and make a lot of money. I think a really smart programmer will pick the language which will pay more dividends in the long run. Kind of choosing a Vim clone over a regular editor.

> Why waste time doing all that stuff when if you just hop to the next language over you can have it all for free?

Because not all language are created equal and you sometime have to choose between fighting the system in the beginning and fighting the language in the long run.

Of course, you'll have an hear for practical considerations too. For instance, I'm currently learning Common Lisp over Scheme because even if I like Scheme better, CL has a wider user base and a proven track record.

> But then again, I've never gotten the sense that the CL folks actually want more people using it

I agree. Most of them don't seem interested. And I think I understand why. CLers are an old community and a lot of newbies jumped in, whined about things not working and left. Their hears are full. However, if you ask for help and ask for it smartly, you'll get answers, you'll - you won't believe this! - you'll get even code written for you.

P.S.: Sorry, but I don't have time to review this post. Bye.
Have you seen the Google Spreadsheet for wedding planning. It has a lot of functionality you mention on your pricing "checklist." I am not saying this to discourage you, just to improve your checklist!
This is very similar to the big company that I work for - we use "visibility" instead of "high profile" though. :) So I suppose when company grows larger, it is inevitable. You just need to adapt to that or leave if you can not stand it. Also, the team and manager you have has big impact on your experiences. I do not believe there is a perfect environment.
My host at Google for my recent tour did say that engineers have limited say with HR and external hiring - which was one of her frustrations.

I think this post skips a big part of the experience at Google. One important use of the 20% time is to check out other areas and projects within Google. If you like the project, consider requesting a transfer to that project.
I have signed copies of all Nelson's works but Future of Information. Not boasting, but I love collecting books. The Home Computer Revolution (inscribed "We haven't got to the future yet") is a stunning book, it predicts so many things in 1977.
JRuby, Resque and Windows
This looks dangerous. Two lanes of traffic competing for limited space under a moving bus? Imagine what happens when a car underneath hits the side and goes into a spin.
Not very interesting post. I could think of teens of problems out of the top of my head that are theoretically finite but there's no enough mass/energy in the universe for them to complete (like generating a program that solves chess).

His first example of "for (int i = 1; i > 0; i++);" Would be matched by some ugly trick like:

int i = 0; while (!i);

That's warranted to halt as the chances for a bit in i to be flipped by cosmic rays tends to be 1 over time.
congrats to an amazing Open Angel Forum company!

proud to be an investor.
"Mr. Coatney estimated that posting links and notes to the Newsweek Twitter feed and Facebook page sent roughly 200,000 to 300,000 readers to Newsweek’s Web site each month. By comparison, Tumblr sent closer to 1,000 a day."

Ugh -- why didn't the author make the time periods symmetrical. This was almost as painful as the confusing title, for me.
I just started "The Ultimate Sales Machine" - looks really, really promising. Author gives good general advice you might've already heard before (sell to current clients, have a good training program, consistency and processes), but he actually takes the time to write about how much "pigheaded discipline and determination" a given policy is going to take to implement. It's been a good read so far, very synergistic with E-Myth for those who like E-Myth.
Also you had 2 "choose a wedding date" on the default checklist you get.
Some hopefully useful feedback from a project where I've mixed Ubuntu and Windows to do the job. Relies on Resque and JRuby.
I already hold a masters.

I would not be doing this for career advancement, and it would not be something that is the opening gambit on my CV either as there are far more relevant points to be made.

I AM looking to do original research, and - he says romantically - it would be nice to do something that directly contributes to society on top of this.
This is the kind of app I was looking for when we got married a few years ago.
It sounds like you did everything correctly but that just one minor detail is off. I hate it when that happens.

Either way, I would have a fairly knowledgeable SEO colleague take a second look at it just to make sure nothing is missed.

A month should be more than enough time but you can try setting up some new links (from new sources) to the new domain just to see if the issue is that the new site is just being really slow on getting indexed for some reason.
Cloning Extinct Species: How Close Are We?
Daemon and Freedom TM by Daniel Suarez. It will rock your world trust me.
I really like the Sherlock Holmes stories.

They are a bit dated, but still good reads.

http://www.amazon.com/Study-Scarlet-Sherlock-Holmes-Mystery/...
How to build a career in cloud computing
> The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I read Gatsby and came away with two thoughts:

1. How incredibly well constructed. Almost every paragraph weaves a story together that starts off slow and then accelerates incredibly rapidly.

2. I think it's so popular because it paints a picture of rich people as actually unsuccessful at what really matters to them, depraved, inconsiderate, immoral, and miserable and hollow on the inside. Note how frequently the book is recommended by English professors with no money who generally hate wealthy people - it's like, "see, they're like us, just even worse!"

Worth reading, though, at the very least to see what the fuss is about. It is incredibly well-constructed from a writing standpoint.
Such practical and classic recommendations!

I'm just trying to make it through A Clash of Kings and Dune.
You're right they can cut power. So freaking what? So can storms, bad drivers, a well placed shot, a wire and an arrow, and several other hazards. If the meshed meters all talk to one pole, then an attacker has to get access to either the pole, or get in range of the relevant meters. If the later, an attacker must change location with to get more than one mesh, and therefore has the same footprint as a well placed thunderstorm.

If the attacker has access to the pole you are already in trouble, so nothing is gained or lost there.

Now, if meshes can identify to multiple regions, that is a different story.

You are screaming that the sky is falling, and i am saying "look, there is something wrong here, but it isn't then end of everything". Just because one piece is bad, it doesn't necessarily mean the whole system is fucked.
What's the domain? It's near-impossible to tell form the information given.
Actually I can see the value for any random middle-manager at a big company whose job involves a bucketload of email correspondance with lots of people outside of the company. That seems like a big enough market to me.
The print version of World War Z is very good as well.
Agreed. I upvoted you both out of spite for the dream killers.
Not only that, but operators which are hardly unique to that language (hello Perl).
Regarding the pricing, I'm planning to have it around $12/month. Basically once you stop paying, you can still access the app but cannot make any changes to your event planning.

Regarding the timezone setting, since user can set up reminders in Marrily to get notified (via email and through their phone), it's critical to know their timezone so that the application can send out the notifications at the right time. The timezone dropdown on the sign up actually tries to be smart and pick out the timezone based on the user's current time.

You're right, Marrily at this stage is not yet ready for international usage yet. All the time-related fields are parsed as %m/%d/%Y (m/dd/yyyy). Once the main app is finalized, I'll add more international support and customization (like time dislay format, and how to format the contact name: "First Last", or "Last, First").

Regarding your comment about the Expenses, this is probably the weakest part of the app. I built a prototype that lets user enter in their budget for each categories and track their expenses accordingly, but I ripped that off since I didn't think it was god enough to release yet. I'd need to do further research and ask people for feedback before building this feature again. In the meantime, I'll add the "provisional" flag to the expense to keep track of provisional/actual. Also, do you think the ability to link the payment to the vendor helpful?

Thanks for all your comments. I really appreciate it.
Carnatic Music Basics