skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a bit of an old story, but perhaps newly relevant after Mexico's incumbent president Felipe Calderon saying last week that existing policies don't seem to be working, and that it is time to consider legalization, though he didn't go so far as endorsing the idea. Given the ~28,000 drug-war-related deaths in Mexico over the last 4 years, I can see why he might be considering alternatives. The previous president, Vicente Fox, enthusiastically endorsed the idea a couple of days later. Retired officeholders can afford to be more bold than when they were in the hot seat, but it came as a big surprise to me to see a sitting president put the idea on the table.

Surprisingly, this news made barely a ripple in the US media...then again, coverage of Mexican affairs here is not that good, and even discussing legalization is political suicide in most of the US. One articulate and credible advocate for the idea is a judge and self-described former 'drug warrior' from Orange County named Jim Gray, who left the GOP to run as a libertarian candidate in 2004 (for the senate, of all things). I caught him speaking recently on CSpan and was highly impressed by his pragmatic approach.

http://www.judgejimgray.com/grayarticles.php or http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/295043-1 or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_P._Gray, for text, video, and background respectively.
This is great. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this is going to mesh with webOS.
I think you've missed my point. They are not suing simply because Java was used to create an application. I don't plan on creating a new, incompatible JVM any time soon, so how does this effect me in any way? I'm a Clojure application and web developer, not a JVM developer.
Tweecal - Job Search Engine
So you won't get much by way of memory savings, but you might expand the volume of work each batch of threads (now on separate processors) could complete if you forked cores - 1 times?
But what percentage of their user base feels this way? It's probably pretty small.

Over a third. Which is abysmal compared to other companies in other industries.

See http://www.allfacebook.com/report-facebook-ranks-low-in-cust... for more details.
What were they thinking at the time?
You will get some benefit from having more processes than cores, though perhaps not six.

Ruby's "stop the world" garbage collector means a process will completely pause during GC, including all threads. You may be better off having twice as many processes at half the ulimit. Fewer threads will be paused at once, and there are fewer objects the VM has to traverse during a GC run.

It's something to investigate when you tune your app.

(This mostly applies to 1.8. I haven't investigated 1.9.)
try being a founder of a ~100 person startup and you will see how weeks quickly become 100 hours. I never meant to say that I did 100 hour weeks every week but I did a lot of 100 hour weeks and definitely not very many 40 hours weeks.
I used to work at HP -- it was a very depressing work environment. As the article mentions, Hurd was absolutely despised and his "cost cutting" was very much ridiculous. The employees were left with nothing, salaries/jobs were cut, even seemingly cheap luxuries like tea and water. We moved buildings twice during my tenure there, each time to a smaller workspace.

As an outsider before I joined, I can say its reputation far exceeds reality. Leaving for YC was a no-brainer. On a sidenote it seems the only ones left are the "lifers," all of the younger engineers have moved on. Short the stock.
I think that Rikai-chan has been supplanted by Perapera-kun these days. They both use the same dictionary file, though. Incidentally, that dictionary can be safely hacked to work in modern versions of FireFox (use Nightly Tester tools or hack the extension directly... I think you edit maxVersion in the RDF file, but I'm working from memory here). The dictionary files haven't been updated in forever and so Firefox thinks they're not compatible any more.

Perapera-kun link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3343/
Thank you for your perspective.

Let me recap the issue as I understand it so far: Oracle filed a lawsuit against Google regarding patents infringement for their use of Dalvik in Android. This is a big problem for Google and for every other alternative JVM (especially open-source) because even for a clean-room implementation you need to be licensed by Oracle.

But as far as I can see this is not so interesting to general application developers since, I think, the majority of them targets the official JVM (open or not) anyway. The same goes for other JVM based languages, since they can generally run well in the OpenJDK.

However the general consent that I see is that this is a bad move for the innovation of the JVM platform and a move that will likely reduce the trust of the industry in this technology.

Maybe new projects will be developed upon another and more open platform, but the vast majority of application-level projects (such as the myriad of enterprise webapps) won't be so interested.

What do you think?

Disclosure: I'm interested in alternative JVM languages because in my company (who is J[ava/VM] centric) we're evaluating technologies to rewrite one of our products from scratch. Aside from my personal interest in new languages obviously.
Do you have any data to do this? I think the results would be interesting.
Go to the language's native country or spend time with people that speak that language. All other methods have failed to teach me to fluently speak another language.
Isn't that necessary though? If your surgeon is operating on you remotely, don't you want those packets prioritized over my LOL Cats download? It seems there are services that are impossible to provide without quality of service guarantees.
Some people use drugs for life-enhancement. You probably don't read HN because your life sucks, or play video games because your life sucks, or watching sporting events because your life sucks.

For some people, drugs are just another enjoyable part of life, not an escape from life.
everything is art. There is nothing that a man or woman can do that is not expression of self.
Yes but before you can try to solve that problem, you first have to solve the problem of critical mass. Facebook did it by first being a club that not anyone could join (e.g. Ivy League and its foreign equivalents) and then relied on those people spreading out into the world.

Consider Flickr - it's a great tool for photographers. But it's not socially useful; all your non-photographer friends can't be tagged in photos. Can they solve that problem? Or can Last.FM? They already have events and a social graph, they just don't have a way to get the rest of people's activity. Basically no-one is going to join a social network that they don't think they can get their friends to sign up to.

Remember http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html -

That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it's not only crude but insightful. "How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).
I think there has always been tremendous curiosity about Apple's products, especially in the early 2000s. The hardware looked interesting, and if you knew anything about the origins of OS X then the software looked very interesting too. But if you weren't already part of the club then it was hard to satisfy that curiosity, due the increasing scarcity of the hardware and the retail environment of the time.

Apple Stores were designed to take advantage of this curiosity.

Every town already had an authorized Apple dealer, and these stores were very nice, but they usually felt overwhelmingly exclusive rather than inclusive. If you were a curious outsider who simply wanted to play with this stuff it was a very awkward experience, and it always left me unsatisfied.

The official Apple Stores solved this problem masterfully.
No-one comes out of this well. Good cautionary tale.
Ask HN: What is your favorite font?
What is your favorite font. Serif and San Serif.
I still haven't seen a statistically sound study that says their mainstream user base has such a negative brand image of Facebook. The dislike has been blown out of proportion over and over again in the blogosphere (ugh, hate that word). If there was such a survey from a reputable research company (Gallup, etc) please link.
Google Europe is hiring UNIX sysadmins (Dublin, London, Zurich)
I have no problem with that, the event ticket is the biggest expense, thanks for doing this! I hope to see you at BoS 2010
Oooh, this is going to improve Oracle's already brilliant public image.
In-factual to hacker news crowd yes. To the average person does it matter? They need to be told in a dumbed down fashion. Like, "If you disliked iPhone on AT&T only, this Google/Verizon pact is going to making using the Internet suck; make your Internet feel as its Cable TV!" Something like that, but either way it needs to be sold to the average joe so they can understand and take action.
I still don't understand why Twitter has not lifted the 140-char limit.

Posterous, Tumblr, Google Buzz, Facebook all allow unlimited status update, along with pictures, links, videos posting.

I'd love to see when Twitter can change.
My take on this is quite simple: I want drug dealers, drug suppliers, pimps and prostitutes to pay taxes. And I don't want my tax money to be wasted policing these areas. Legalize it and let IRS worry about them, this is the worst thing for such business: with the high profit margins gone and taxmen watching over the shoulder organized crime will have no reason to be involved in these areas.
Of the big names the author dragged in (and that I recognized) none was in any way that I can identify a collectivist. Most lived or flourished before socialism was named.
Being an EU national, I wish I was qualified to apply, but I'm sure an HNer will make it. Good luck to all the applicants!
I was about to respond to one of a dozen or so comments on this thread. Can someone please explain why comments suddenly get deleted or become invisible?
Yes indeed, and now I have to post: http://www.xkcd.com/768/
I've tried bouldering in a borrowed pair. Edging gets painful fast. Far too much stress on my toes. Having separated toes and a relatively pliable sole produces an awful lot of foot strain.

Real climbing shoes are tighter and more rigid. They do just the opposite of what these barefoot shoes do; they bunch your toes together, forming them into a kind of single supertoe. It's probably about as bad for you as wearing high-heels, but it's very effective.

Also, the soles on barefoot shoes are not sticky enough for climbing, so smearing doesn't work too well.
"Dude" has been unisex for a while now. It would be almost offensive (not to mention dated) to call someone a "dudette".
About 10 years ago, I arranged to have everything powered by AA batteries - even my PDA and my phone (it was a Motorola brick). Everything but my laptop, but the PDA (a Psion 5) would do in a pinch. GPS and CD player as well. Torch. Alarm clock. Nowadays I don't think you can even buy stuff to do that with, everything has a proprietary battery and charger.
My biggest problem is that I have a small screen and the tweet button blocks the left side of the content the whole way down. Really annoying.
Pricing models, the freemium myth and why you may not be charging enough
It is always clear what groklaw's preference is in any given case. But I've never noticed a bad bias in the facts reported.

Admittedly the SCO reporting may have sounded one-sided, but in that case the facts were legitimately also rather one-sided.
Google and the Search for the Future
Facebook has a 420-character limit on status updates, fwiw. Obviously more than 140-char, but I've been annoyed at times when I've wanted to post something more in the high-400s range.
Not to go all cypherpunk, but you can pretty easily create an encrypted SOCKS proxy tunnel using an OpenSSH client. So if you have an SSH server in a country you trust, you can tunnel your browser traffic through there for connections you are nervous about.

first link from google:

http://embraceubuntu.com/2006/12/08/ssh-tunnel-socks-proxy-f...

EDIT: clarity
The other feature/problem is that you're hearing the two other students learning with you. They will often make the similar mistakes that you will make, which is encouraging. However, I think that 1 out of 3 fluent speakers on a tape is less effective for learning the correct pronunciation.

For those who don't know the program: the way it works is that the teacher says a sentence in English, at which point you are supposed to pause the recording and formulate it in German (or whatever language). When you continue the playback, one of the other students will also formulate the sentence in German. Then the teacher will correct them if they're wrong, and repeat the correct sentence (with correct pronunciation). The idea is that the correct pronunciation is the last thing you hear.

It's true that this may be less than ideal if your goal is to speak the language fluently. I'm mostly worried about passing a (written) translation exam, so pronunciation is a secondary concern for me.
olefoo got this right the last time I saw this come up here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1117032

The whole 'useless use of cat' meme is basically designed to let Randal Schwartz make fun of people. At one point it may have made a difference, and certainly if you have a shell script that is getting called 10,000 times a day it might make sense to optimise it. But for doing stuff from the commandline; weird shell acrobatics is a premature optimisation.

If you know that you can use a command directly on a filename or -, then great: skip cat. If you're not sure, and you use cat, great: get some work done. If you like to write < somefile command, great: I actually like how that looks. If you prefer the readability (real or alleged, I don't care) of cat file | command, fine: go nuts. Surely there have to be more important things to worry about.

Since it got a lot of comments and votes, here's the entire previous thread I had in mind: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1116085
In Mexico, marijuana, cocaine, and heroin are already legal in personal use amounts much like Portugal. The problems Mexico is having are the side effects of drug shipment cartels that move substances from South and Central America to the USA.

Mexico could further legalize transshipment of drugs so that cartels could just hire Mexican shipping companies to deliver the drugs to the USA border. And that might help a little in the interior of the country, but the interior of Mexico already sees low levels of drug crime.

The real problem will be crossing the USA border with the drugs. As long as that is a critical concern of the cartels, they will need decoys, armies of labor, help from police, forged bills of lading, bribed officials, and the whole infrastructure of corruption and violence.

Since the USA isn't going to be legalizing anything as far as I can see, there will always be violence in Mexico paid for by USA users. I don't see anything the Mexican government can do about it.
USL vs. BSDi was settled after about one year. BSD's problem is that most progress gets entombed in proprietary forks. It was inevitable that a GPL'd kernel, being immune to that problem, would catch up and displace it.

Your overall thesis relies on innovative work being immune from patent holder attacks. I think that might be true in a system that functioned correctly, but not in ours. Patents work if you're forced to claim a specific high-effort solution rather than the entire problem space.
"It is only proposal". You make it sound like a proposal, in this case, is much better than a deal. Believe me, it's not. What Google is proposing is ridiculous and goes against everything we worked for in the last 20 years.
Inconsolata - http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html - I won't work on in any IDE without first making this the default. It is incredibly worth of consistently being considered among the best programming fonts (http://hivelogic.com/articles/top-10-programming-fonts).
I have this analogy in mind where the modern-day smartphone is the equivalent of a technological swiss-knife. In 80% of all situations it is sufficient for the task at hand.
If you're an analytical person who is confident in your ability to learn grammar and organize your learning -- and I imagine this applies to lots of folks on HN -- your main concerns will be:

1) Practice with a native speaker.

2) Ongoing motivation to study.

Craigslist may solve this problem for you, depending on where you live and what you're studying. On Craigslist you'll find native speakers offering conversation at very low prices. Here's a current example on the Austin Craigslist:

"Conversational Japanese lesson for 20 dollars per hour (Central Austin)

Let's meet at a coffee shop, and speak in Japanese; please buy me a drink. I am a Japanese female who moved from Tokyo recently. 20 dollars per hour. "

I'm guessing this person doesn't provide organized lessons and help understanding grammar, but honestly, I've tried a couple of "teachers" charging $20-$25 per hour, and they didn't either. People with good teaching skills charge more, I guess. $20 per hour to talk to a native speaker is worth every penny, though, if only because you make sure you study so you aren't embarrassed by your lack of progress since last time. If it helps (it helped me) you can cultivate a mild crush on your tutor for extra motivation ;-)
maybe you have to partition the file but I'm guessing random access will allow you to access it fine, I haven't ever poked a 35GB text file either.

first thing I'd try is probably pseudo-this:

while((entry=readDataPoint())!=null){

sha1e = sha1(entry);

//database has log N index on sha1e

if(database.contains(sha1e)) continue;

//database object figures out insert syntax

database.insert({sha1:sha1e,data:entry});

}
That's pretty disrespectful. Sloganeering has its place. The very term "net neutrality" was a brilliant capture of the semantic high-ground.

But it can turn on you in an instant, as we're seeing with Google's "Don't be evil" slogan.

As far as I can tell Google are trying something nuanced, to impose some rules, where before we had an uneasy Mexican standoff. And they are getting crucified for it.
Darwin (programming game)
For those wondering, like I did, what the post title is referring to, read the comments.
I just found a way to automate XSS in Google PlayGround.

http://christopherwoodall.com/blog/?x=entry:entry100814-0521...
It would be amusing if this was one big Machiavellian plan by Google to rile up internet users to put more pressure on for net neutrality...
As much as I disagree with false reporting, paul9290 might have a point here. The same issue exists with software patents, mainly the sad fact that no one other than us really cares. I'd vote for a proper explanation but no one really sits through and listens to those before being nagged for 30-some years, movies being made, books being written (example: the environmentalist movement).
What can kill Facebook? Burnout. And it will eventually happen.
A Brief History of Java
One word: Buzz. It violated everyone's privacy.
Best case for whom? AOL is a walled garden (which is what FB is now). At least with an Exchange-like scheme I'd have some modicum of control (see Diaspora).
Who is the 'we' in your statement?
A few statements related to subject:
1) 500mln have joined FB. Why others didn't? Isn't it because FB has nothing really valuable to offer them?

2) If FB continue trying to become all-internet-in-one-company then they will soon follow Yahoo.

3) Future belongs to specialized social networks utilizing unified social protocols and APIs (not developed yet). LinkedIn is one of early birds. More to come.
Any bodybuilder will tell you that more than 10-12 reps is useless. A few will lift heavier weights, then fall back to lighter weights and extends repetitions out past that, but it is not as common. There has been an ongoing dispute about whether going to muscle failure is a good thing, and this seems to resolve it.
Oh if only that were the case.
It forces people to think about what they say and be concise. The limit defines Twitter. I hope they never drop it.
I'm learning RoR myself at the moment with this book:

http://railstutorial.org/book

It takes you through building various demo apps, using ruby, rails (separately at times), git and heroku. It doesn't bog you down in too much detail or theory, instead it introduces ideas in bite-sized packets and then shows the code relating to the theory immediately. I'm learning rails 3 from it, without ever having picked up much of rails 2. Highly recommended. The guy who wrote it, Michael Hartl, was in YC too.
Given the numbers, the need to dedupe, the poster's strong motivation and relative inexperience...

I'd guess it's a gigantic spam list.
Yes this is probably getting too much hectic for him. Handling PR is not something he is expected to be good at.
This post is a useful rundown on where threads stand in Ruby now, but it hangs on a bit of a straw man argument. The argument for evented concurrency assumes threads work. Async design isn't a reaction to MRI's crappy green threads.

It's also not a very compelling argument for threading to say "web programs don't share a lot of state, so you don't have to worry about synchronization". If all you do are CRUD apps, you can indeed punt scaling to the database. That doesn't mean threads are more effective than events; it means you made concurrency and synchronization someone else's problem. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not a convincing demonstration of threading.
> Patents work if you're forced to claim a specific high-effort solution rather than the entire problem space.

This is a beautiful, concise encapsulation of the concerns that some have with how software patents have worked in practice.
I dont know. I like their articles often. But I rarely see any point from the side they dont support mentioned there
'Hack' is the trendy buzzword that marketers use to replace the word, 'tip.' Yeah, quite annoying.
The blogger makes a point that it becomes "his" brand versus the Voice123 brand.
I second Karaoke.

Learning a language by first learning to mimic songs is a great way to build pronunciation skills, and also get to know common words and how they go together. You then also have a tune to associate with different constructs, and it's much easier to memorise a tune than it is to memorise words.
Thank you Mac fans for the anti Apple Revolution
I'm going to check them out, thanks!
I've done rock climbing in both the five fingers and regular rock climbing shoes. Rock climbing shoes are definitely better 99% of the time, their rigidity helps you to maintain secure footholds.

There's the occasional exception though, I was once able to gain a foothold in the five fingers by sticking my big toe in a hole that fit it exactly.
A Warning About a Weak Link in Secure Web Sites
This can be easily achieve by using the Twitter's newly added feature Tweet Button!

Here is how you can make your longest tweet.

Just type this URI on your address bar http://twitter.com/share?text=&url=yourtext

Change yourtext to whatever you want (make it more lengthy and use whatever language you want) and bang! The longest tweet created! It's working simply because of the validation error in the url shortening of t.co, I reckon! Hope this might be fixed very soon. But, until then you can make longest tweets after all! Happy tweeting.. oh. happy looongest tweeting!!
The headline is misleading -- it's only US and coalition casualities. Doesn't count civilian casualties, which are an order of magnitude higher but much less carefully recorded.
In a mobile client it just shows up as 5 links:
http://t.co/kzORDJY http://t.co/jVaqnZY http://t.co/0Vc4sGd http://t.co/339Lg4T http://t.co/72heLf0

It seems to be a auto-expansion of t.co links into text Twitter content inside other twitter posts.