skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe it, but I was just going to be using it as a cache and memcached seems more appropriate.... I'd rather memory only cache ghat uses least-recently-used purging than one that I'd trying to be s persistent database. Might still use redis, I've an open mind there, but seems memcached was designed for this purpose.
The Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Dudley_and_Stephens is very interesting; it describes an actual case where one of the people in a lifeboat was killed and eaten by the others, who would have otherwise all died. They claimed it was a "custom of the sea" that you could draw lots and kill one victim in such circumstances, but the court decided in a highly controversial case that necessity is no defence against a charge of murder.

An amusing article about the trolley problem is "Brain Teaser" (http://www.mindspring.com/~mfpatton/harper%27s.htm) which satirizes these ethics problems by adding an absurd number of conditions such as a busload of orphans, transplant patients about to die, a brain in a vat, and the inventor of the pop-top can.
Merchant should have taken into account #3.
Responding to billybob (I guess the thread is too deep):

I've used domain names with no public DNS for corporate Active Directory domains. They might have a different domain for their website, but by registering it you are covered.
I posted an ad on www.philweavers.net
aaaaaaand, I think if you want work on WordPress you've found another client.

message me: info-at-orioneweb-dot-it
We used barter to get our first clients last year, which worked pretty well:

http://ai.redsymbol.net/2010/09/boostrapping-your-business-w...

This may or may not be a great fit for you, but it's worth checking out.
Yeah, I love my Pre, but the hardware already feels dated. It's crazy how much progress is being made in mobile devices every year now, reminds me of desktops in the mid 90s. You buy one and feel like it's out of date a month later.

What really killed them was launching exclusively on Sprint. With hardware evolving as fast as it does, by the time it made it to Verizon and AT&T it was just no longer compelling. While I actually love Sprint, there are a lot more people on Verizon and AT&T.

I really think market share will take care of any lack of apps. More advanced hardware, a more attractive design, and a better marketing campaign would take care of that. I think HP has a real shot, though maybe my love of WebOS has me biased.
They can do it because there is no shortage of companies throwing themselves at Groupon. And Groupon knows it:

"And now there are many more businesses trying to join Groupon than it can handle. Owen noted that the company takes a big cut of the revenue (up to 50 percent) earned from these deals. But since Groupon has a waiting list of 35,000 businesses, Mason said, “If we were economically rational, we would take even more.”"

From http://venturebeat.com/2010/09/15/demo-the-secret-of-groupon...
What could you code in four hours?
If you were allotted four hours to program anything you wanted in any language and environment, how much could you accomplish? What tips would you give to be productive?

Let's say these four hours include planning time, and any test cases/docs that need to be created. I'm talking production work.

I've heard about people coding thousands of lines of code in a few hours, how would _you_ accomplish this feat? Creative ideas and mind hacks welcomed :)
The general consensus is that trees aren't sentient. They may very well be - but that's beyond the scope of this particular argument.

The original assertion is that people are being logically inconsistent by wanting to sacrifice the young tree, yet reluctant to sacrifice the young child. Based on the premise of tree non-sentience, it is entirely logically consistent that the two cases be decided differently.

The problem with tree sentience in general is that we have yet to define "think" in the context you are using it.
I'm not a designer, but as a consumer I think site design is extremely important. If your site looks like it was thrown up hastily or is a fly-by-night operation, I'm definitely less likely to give you my credit card information. Why is it the easiest to attack? Because I think their design is so bad that it wouldn't be hard to dramatically improve, with relatively little effort.
In case this sounds familiar, as it did to me, note the date published: 10 Feb 2002.
Whatever you changed broke it in Opera. Won't clear a search now.
How to register the least valued domains algorithmically :)

I suspect where the 1 digit is makes a big difference LLLD being a decent combo or DLLL but LDLL or LLDL are probably almost all garbage.
The green bar diagrams are great. It sums up why so many sites make me feel uneasy. If a site treats you as ad viewing cattle, their design is 80% junk (ads, inward facing "related" articles) and 20% content (see: digg, huffpo, tc, other "just a blog" things). If the site treats you as something worth while, you get content front-and-center with navigation and other help out of the way, but still nearby.

Each week I become more tempted to have every site I visit filtered by default through Arc90 Readability / Safari Reader.
"most consumers

Is there any research that this is actually the case? I'd be willing to guess that this is the case for many folks on HN, but I haven't heard many iPad owners (of which I am not one) complaining about this.

Count me in with the folks that prefer syncing to a computer rather than OTA.
This is the only sort of UX, interaction design and usability "top ten" list that should ever receive upvotes: one that cites references and only publishes information that has been validated in some fashion.
"John told me that when the consumer pays less than $10, Groupon usually takes 100% of the money."

How sweet this is for Groupon, they take it all with almost no costs at all...
Funnier still, I see it the opposite way: reddit discussions are, more often than not, more valuable than the articles themselves (although the s/n ratio is diminishing).

Same is true for HN, but the s/n ratio remains quite high.
Clearly you're an idealist. I don't mean that as an insult. The problems you've brought up can be solved by other means while retaining the existing infrastructure. For example, you could have cars that are non-oil-based. You could increase the amount of telecommuting allowed by the workforce. I would think those things are more likely in the US than making everyone ride a bike.

Your vision of the future basically kills every suburb and urban area and would reduce humans to extremely high population densities in highly concentrated areas. Leading to problems of it's own. But we're really off-topic at this point.

Interestingly enough, you said above you are in chicago. The area I am talking about above is in the western suburbs of chicago.
Much like four bucks for caffeine water, that depends entirely on two parties agreeing it is worth that. (Starbucks certainly has a marketing spend over $10 per customer. LTV is in the hundreds or thousands for a daily latte drinker.)
I don't know what this is. In Opera, I get Illegal URL.
Yes, "difficult" can certainly mean "too time consuming to be worthwhile".
He could be using a public-facing DNS server that only responds to queries from certain hosts.
Our first sell was a giveaway, but we absolutely made sure we could use their name as a credential in exchange for it being free. They agreed and all we talked about for 2 months was the fact we were working with these guys. Every email, every call, we mentioned their name.

It lent us some credibility and gave us something to talk about. It always makes businesses/institutions feel much better if they know someone else has already taken the risk.

Our first PAYING client came a few weeks later. During the process, we were pretty open about being early stage and surely got paid less than what we probably should have, but the openness plus the credential made them comfortable enough to pay a two person bootstrapped company and we were off and running.
I spend weeks and weeks deciding on a name. So far I've had Rankiac and BitBuffet, both of which were almost 80% completed before I ever had the domain. EveryMentor wasn't available and I had to WAIT for the domain to expire for about 20ish days (it was pending deletion).
Which is why I said "If there was sensible infrastructure for commuting by bicycle, there wouldn't be a problem." There might be a few bike paths around for recreational use, but you're hard pressed to find adequate bike infrastructure in any American city. (More on this issue can be read here: http://daily.sightline.org/daily_score/series/bicycle-neglec...)
You forgot the most important piece of advice. A number not just showing interest but an exact dollar (or euro or whatever) interest. You will almost certainly negotiate more and try not to offend the current owner with a lowball. If you want it, someone else probably did before you.
The city-states in your pocket: first look at Civilization V
From what I can tell EC2 instances are pretty under powered for the price. There are a lot of good things about EC2, but the small instances are not that great. The good thing is you can start small and quickly grow. You are right about needed 2 instances for Mongo. Design it so that you can turn on new front end instances to handle the load as needed. This way you can start as cheap as possible and add servers (and cost) as you grow.
> I see this as sort of a honeymoon for Groupon while people figure out how it really benefits (or doesn't benefit) their business.

Agreed. I find it striking that most Groupon offers don't really exploit the key feature of the site yet, viz. the "threshold system" which activates the groupon only after a certain number of users have pledged in.

Groupon offers should generally be run by high-margin, capital-intensive businesses offering niche products, not small retail outfits. The OP was a coffee shop, an industry with high variable costs and low margins, so the groupon offer was prima facie inappropriate. But even cafes charge high markups on some niche "premium" products (in order to shift their fixed costs onto a price-insensitive customer base). Instead of targeting the discount on these relatively niche products--thus potentially attracting profitable repeat business--the cafe let the offer bear on their near-commodity offerings: coffee and cookies. How on earth was this a good decision?
I'm glad you liked it :). I hate it when I see a blog ro something and it's just a teeny tiny little bit of relevant text surrounded by a bunch of cruft.

The worst thing is that a lot of times this cruft isn't even ads, it's just other things for the site (or a picture of the author or something).
Winning a victory in court is only a secondary objective.

Arrington wants to win in the court of public opinion, and he wants to wreck Fusion Garage. He wants the people who made the decision to bury him irrelevant to the Valley. This was his baby, anyway. Not that it wouldn't have been crushed by the iPad and all the johnny come laties.
yes, see Zepto OS and publications. http://www.mcs.anl.gov/research/projects/zeptoos/
Exactly what I came to say. Why not just call your service "Location Analytics" and take a longer domain if you have to. I think people place way to much value on a snazzy short domains. Customers are probably searching for you anyhow. Why not own your primary search term.
Cryptography with JavaScript
What category of business do they run? How long ago did they run their groupons?
If you aren't solving a true, acknowledged pain then you probably won't even get people to use it for free. They may sign up - but they probably won't use it.
yay for clay and the middle way. he reminds me of uncle ben: "with great power comes great responsibility."

he has a similarly level response to the problem of information overload (instead, filter failure): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI
Ask HN: How does a new grad transplant to the Bay Area tech scene meet people?
I'm a new grad coming to the SF Bay Area in pursuit of the tech dream, however, I'm feeling pretty alone. There's thousands of transplants like myself coming in each year, yet, I don't know where to meet them or where to start in this formidable, diverse area. Help me crack this egg...

Since I'm a good tech nerd...
-I'm not terribly into playing sports so joining my local *ball/board/bike club/team would be a faux, contrived effort.
-I'd be considered a little on the shy side before extroverted.
-I'm into techy things, of course. I like reading TechCrunch, HN, programming, soldering things, etc.

However, unlike most tech nerds...
-There's a limit to how much I want to talk about tech. Friday night at 10PM? No. Saturday at noon while strolling the Mission? Sure.
-I like to have good conversation over a few beers, anytime. I'm not socially challenged. I invite the proposition of meeting other people and drinking in a bar. The thought of doing anything that's not having fun, crazy adventures on a Friday/Saturday night is uncomfortable to me.

Also, unlike most companies in the Valley, my company tends to be secretive. As such, there are large proverbial walls between teams so it's hard to meet people. We just don't have general interest mailing lists, endless special interest groups (we have ~20), openness, and lots of offsites and team builders. Combine that with the fact that everyone on my team is in their 30s/40s and just had children and I'm stuck on that front. I've even tried the local alumni chapter. They also all fall in this age range.

So, to that end, folks, I need your help.

Previous tech companies I've worked at practically came with a complimentary group of friends and events as soon as you walked in the door. Now, it's the real world, I've graduated college, and long-term relationships are harder to find.

Thoughts? Ideas? Clubs? Sympathizers?

(I seriously think this could be a startup, too. I'd pay some money to go on fun events/trips with other Bay Area newbs.)
The best types of web start-ups
Certainly Orbs is a good replacement for a wiki. We are playing with an idea to allow for moderated wikis. In other words, you can take content from other people and choose which stuff you want to let in.
Exactly. (at least in way that I've proposed the service)
Great quote from the article: "When you buy something cheap and bad, the best you’re going to feel about it is when you buy it. When you buy something expensive and good, the worst you’re going to feel about it is when you buy it." Of couse, this assumes that you can afford it at all. But largely accurate if so, IMO.
I searched it from firefox search box. Interestingly, it's now showing twitter.com for the same search. Definitely, ff is playing foul here.
You have no privacy rights in a company owned email account, ever. They own every word you type, every email you send.

How hard would it have been for that employee to have used his personal gmail account from his workstation?
I'm sure Groupon will make a similar exception for Posie's Cafe.
I started building a new app and was bummed when I discovered Chrome didn't support the Html5 File API. The next day Chrome 6 was released along with said API support. Now the canary version includes WebGL support. These guys are moving FAST. IE9 doesn't stand a chance.
I completely agree with you (which was why I didn't respond to what you said). Doing something like adding a extra bike lane next to the car lanes and things like that. I would love to see something like that and it would probably make me want to bike to places more frequently as well. It would be safer for everyone.
First free flight of the SuperMod configuration with fairing and deployable legs
Thats truly amazing. He's no hacker but brave as hell. My body was just trying to scream "attach the safetyline !!" during the whole video.
My First (and last) Groupon Experience
I was referring to something I had heard a while ago about the NSA requiring keys to skype encryption because it can cross international borders. Don't know how true it is.
I think this idea if quite compelling. We will consider this for a future project. I can think of some things we can do to make this a perfect hybrid of "complete control for the designer" and "completely simple for the designer's client."

Very interesting...

Sunny
Self preservation still plays a role. Unfortunately we as humans are wired by nature to always have a me before anyone else unless it is our offspring in which case that role is reversed.
tl;dr: Sauce Labs believes that not only should Microsoft rev their browser much more quickly, but that -- like Chrome -- the update process should be transparent and pretty much mandatory.

It seems to me that they completely fail to understand the costs associated with maintenance of corporate systems. It's inconceivable to me that they could take this so lightly. Having rapid changes (even if they're smaller) with little control of when they are deployed is a recipe for disaster for many IT organizations, and thus a good way to get your product kicked out of the enterprise.
For example, you could have cars that are non-oil-based.

Not really a solution. The problem is the sheer energy required to move a 1-2 ton steel cage, not the specific source of that energy, though petroleum is an especially bad one.

"You could increase the amount of telecommuting allowed by the workforce."

While that would help, it would also be useful if you could, for instance, buy groceries or really just leave the house without having to bring the steel cage with you.

"I would think those things are more likely in the US than making everyone ride a bike."

The current infrastructure policy in the US can be described as "making everyone drive a car", even if they live in cities which are easily large enough to make other solutions more practical. I don't want to make anyone ride a bike--but I sure want to allow people to safely ride bikes if they so choose, maybe even encourage it.

The suburbs were created 50-60 years ago in the era of cheap petroleum and post-war infrastructure development. They aren't anything important to be preserved or saved--for various reasons it would be more accurate to view them as a failed social experiment.
That is completely untrue I am afraid, at least in the UK, US and most of Europe. There are quite strong laws to protect against accessing "personal" email (or, rather, using it in court).

(trust me :) I work in computer forensics so we have to know these things)
It's definitely important to do a measured environmental review when installing a large infrastructure.

However, the world as it stands now is going to have data centers, and these take energy. Direct environmental cooling undoubtedly has less of an impact than producing energy, powering a compressor, and using that to cool circulated air. Think of the relative number energy conversions (0 vs 2+).
I love Netflix, and streaming movies has been a big improvement over the experience of renting DVDs. But I'm disappointed in the recommendation system. For me, a movie is either worth watching or it isn't, so a simple thumbs up/down system would be better. I don't sit down and decide, "Gee, I want to see a mediocre 3-star movie." Even then, I'm not sure I'd be happy with the recommendations. Too often, it seems like movies are being hid from me in favor of the recommendations, so a random button would be nice to hit once in a while. Especially now that my whole family shares one account for streaming and can rate movies, destroying my own preferences.
Start small with two maybe three micro instances. Try to scale out rather than up. When the time comes you can step up to the larger instances. You might want to separate some of your services into clusters and run them from a couple sets of instances. A couple of micros for the front end and a couple for the back end. You will probably save a few $$$ and have more control of your growth.
ChaCha Says They’ll Bail On T-Mobile
I would probably go the highest-level route I could, using tools that I am familiar with (and won't get caught in nasty workarounds due to my unfamiliarity with the platform).

In my case right now, I'd probably put together a web mashup using a container of useful platforms--Like Apache ServiceMix using Camel, ActiveMQ, CXF, etc. to grab services, munge them, and output something useful.

Then again, going super low-level might be fun too. Go to the depths of the OS or a compiler and fix an annoying persistent issue.
Nothing from an engineering standpoint.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_for_art%27s_sake
Yes, sorry - I should have said those resolutions are what comes out of the hardware video encoder, rather than the camera.
Sorry, Ares was Michael Griffin's folly, using Shuttle technology but not the actual, well understood and qualified components (e.g. the SRBs are wider and the Ares I stack has 5 segments instead of the normal 4, all leading to extreme $$$ and safety problems).

Direct really looks good, assuming NASA hasn't yet destroyed enough of the existing Shuttle infrastructure. With one exception it uses actual Shuttle components (the one issue is what do you use for a man-rated restartable in space rocket engine, which is a problem you need to solve anyway, I think) and it's modular so that you don't need both Ares I and the heavy lift version of it, a massive and needless duplication of work (which is entirely appropriate when you notice that post-Apollo NASA is more a public works project than anything else).

I think you can blame NASA-the-agency: they (Griffin) wanted to do this themselves (the higher levels of design and management of the program) and they simply weren't willing to listen to bad news or draw the obvious conclusions from a program that was slipping a year every year is was in development.

That said, Jerry Pournelle does agree with you, in that we, the US, have lost enough rocket science ability that we can't at the moment build a 600,000 lb [ forget the term, but it's a 100% reusable, quick turnaround single stage to orbit and back vehicle concept that he and others have been pushing for years ]. We'd have to rebuild the talent and teams, starting with smaller projects.
Yeah, insane. When I first heard about Groupon, I assumed their cut would be ~10% mark. I couldn't believe it was 50% - and that's on top of a 50% discount! So the retailer is only getting 25% of normal income.

What kind of business has advertising overheads of 75%? I can't see how this could work for anyone. And you can't cap the number sold? wtf??

I feel really sorry for her. She got sold the deal by Groupon, against her better judgement. I know how that feels, we've all done it. She wont make that mistake again.
That's exactly true which is why I'm working on understanding IO bound applications (my current research: http://github.com/mathgladiator/node.ocaml )