skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is that point is inherently subjective and gives a veto to the least-rational, most-emotional people. Allegations that certain speech is 'harassing' or 'hate speech' can be made strategically to censor disfavored speech. Such policies can even provide an incentive for violence, as a means of proving certain speech should be squelched. ("You said something that made me throw this rock, so you should shut up. And I'll keep throwing rocks until I've shown exactly how dangerous your speech is.")

Unless speech contains a credible threat of violence, speech is not itself 'violent'. No reasonable, law-abiding person should see/hear any speech and be thrown into a violent rage. (If they do, they're the person breaching civilized norms deserving punishment -- not the original speaker.)

I understand the business reasons for caving to any sufficiently-large angry mob with grievances. But if more businesses said they didn't censor otherwise legal speech because of emotion of the part of third parties, as a matter of non-discriminatory policy, then it'd be easier for all similar businesses to adhere to the same principle.
re: potential data loss: I typically run 1 master and one read-only slave on another server. Replication of writes from the master to the read-only slave is very fast. Sure, there is a window for data loss, but for crucial data use a relational database. Also, it is great to be able to really load down the read-only slave for analytics, etc.
Is just it me or does anyone else see parallels with this and the 1970's Skokie, IL Nazi parade incident? Fanatics fan the flames of hate, passion, and free speech to make a media circus of the whole debate.
free speech is an illusion that doesn't exist, and shouldn't exist. There are lots of things that you can't say and shouldn't be allowed to say - yelling "fire" in a crowded place, inciting racial hatred, etc etc
It's a reasonable amount if they made anywhere near that in revenue. But I'm betting they don't.
Good on Rackspace. Free speech doesn't mean the freedom to say whatever you want on someone else's private infrastructure. You are free to burn books, spout hate speech, or do whatever other ridiculous stuff, but you're not entitled to use somebody else's private communication medium to do so.

Rackspace has spent millions in establishing a private infrastructure on which to conduct their private business--hosting web sites. Your right to free speech is not the same as Rackspace's right to do whatever they like on the infrastructure they wholly own.

If you want to make a website about burning Korans or whatever other hateful propaganda, purchase your own server, install it in your own datacenter, and pay for your own uplink. Then you'll be free to do whatever you want on your own servers. That's freedom of speech.

Edit: And if you don't like that Rackspace is pulling sites for whatever reason, then you too are free to host your own server in your own datacenter, maybe even on land you yourself have purchased. Or hell, get another host that explicitly allows that kind of stuff. Then you won't be constrained by what is in truth a business relationship, not an infringement on any constitutional right.
And the iPhone "copied" ecospheres of Symbian, RIM, Windows Mobile, etc, adding a twist with an insane focus on shininess and touchscreen primacy. Google, when "copying" the iPhone, put their focus on choice (both of software and hardware) and the attendant openness. Microsoft is about to try to "copy" the iPhone, but with a distinct aesthetic.

The difference between those copies and the Zynga business model? The former actually have differences.
"I understand the business reasons for caving to any sufficiently-large angry mob with grievances"

Yup. A DDoS attack was almost certainly going their way, and perhaps physical threats as well.
It's not too hard to get good gas mileage on open roads. A few years ago me and my girlfriend drove a 2001 Honda Insight 1040 miles on one 12 gallon tank. (85mpg - fully loaded with luggage + nasty traffic.) In the Tour De Sol rally, we got 94mpg. Keep in mind it is a stock car and there was a lot of weight we could have removed. (AC, second person, interior, hybrid parts, spare tire, air bags, glass, etc.) We also only came in second place.

The car is truly light (1850 lbs), but weight mostly affects rolling resistance (unless you hit brakes). With a lighter car, you can use a smaller engine. Though, around the same time I drove an 80s sedan with a v8 engine several hundred miles on the open road and got 40 mpg. It was so loaded down I mostly drove 50-55mph.

For open roads, aerodynamics is everything. 80% of the energy is spent moving the wind at highway speeds. Even hills aren't a problem (they store energy like batteries). Perhaps cars could look more like airplanes? Then we could go 80mph and still get good mpg.

Also, I find it curious that you need to modify a car to make it "safe" for use on a race track. They have insurance policies that require cages, fire suppression, rigid seats, 6 point belts, air bags removed, etc. They still tend to be quite light.
I would go with Python as well. If you want to play with Web applications, there's Django. If you want to do desktop apps, there's TK. It has a fairly vibrant community, so getting help won't be hard.
Great News for MonoTouch Users
I'm not a car enthusiast, but I'll give my .02. My first car was my parents 56 Chevy V8 that weighed over 3000 pounds and got 15mpg on premium (.35 per gallon). My current car is a little over 2000 pounds and gets 38 mpg, 4 cyl, nothing special. Typical cars are quite a bit smaller and lighter now. Vans and SUV's are not, because they are classified as truck and have had much less stringent mileage requirements.

The car in the story was probably super lightweight, maybe less than 1000 pounds. It has a small lightweight efficient engine that in a normal car would give you 0-60 mph in about a week.

Driving style makes a huge difference in this type of demonstration, slow acceleration, no AC, going downhill in neutral or with the engine off, etc. A friend of min in high school got 50 mpg from and old Plymouth by coasting downhill to school and "driving" on the half back home. We live in a rural area with no traffic.
plex too
I am not sure the analogies work. It's a Rackspace server on a Rackspace datacenter but nobody is swearing loudly in or carrying weapons into Rackspace's offices.
When Americans say "free speech" we usually are referencing the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which holds that the federal (and as of Gitlow v. New York, state and local) government cannot make a law prohibiting the free exercise of speech.

1. If you're making reference to the First Amendment, Rackspace cannot offend that. They're a corporation, not a government.

2. Even if you're not, why should Rackspace be forced to host someone's content that violates their AUP (and that they probably find offensive themselves?) If you don't like it, don't purchase their services.
Sincere question: Does that make you better than those who enjoy the "quick cash" entertainment? FWIW I think the answer to that is affirmative, but then I'm a walking example of confirmation bias on this topic.
I agree with you, but if I had to choose between a functional Linux driver and documentation, even as someone running BSD, I would take the Linux driver every time. A functional driver with source lends some confidence that nothing is missing. Documentation can be well-intentioned, but it is rarely so complete that you could write a major piece of software with nothing else.

Of course, drivers+documentation would be even better :)
They should be kidding. They understand nothing about web and open standards. That is why they loose.
Well, it very much depends. If you are the new bakery guy in a street with three or four other bakers, you are entering a market of high competition. The other three bakers are competing perhaps at extreme levels already, whether through branding, building a loyal customer base by providing better customer service, better products, a nice environment, friendly bakers, and price certainly.

Now, if you, the new kid on the block, enter this highly competitive market, you need to be extremely clever to be competing while not loosing money and, if so you manage to compete, they would probably copy you before they die themselves.

If however you decide to take a little bit more time upfront and invest more effort to find a place where your service is needed and there is little competition, you'll be making healthy profits. That is why copying does not win in the long term and even the company in question has now had to start to make their own products.
> I've never seen a doctor without scrubs, either in an office or a hospital.

Weird... your primary care physician wears scrubs? Pretty much only ER and Trauma docs wear scrubs here in Baltimore. (It was the same in New Haven).

Right now, she basically solves the clothing size problem with retailer loyalty: she knows what size Ann Taylor clothes fit her correctly. Perhaps if she was confident that she could figure out the correct size of items on the internet she'd feel comfortable shopping there.
There are some other things that are reasonably likely to cause buffer overflows in the XML-parser-user even if the XML parser is perfect, mostly involving very large numbers of elements (<b><b><b><b><b><b>... etc), a tag with thousands of attributes, tags with very large attributes, etc. XML really does have some characteristics attack vectors. However, I am not aware of anything that doesn't; JSON has very similar vectors, as does any recursively-specified serialization format, and of course we all know the joys of binary specifications and screwing with length headers.

As you quoted, "Programmers tend to use XML poorly", but then, "Programmers tend to use serialization poorly" would work just as well. I've only recently really started internalizing just how much of a minefield serialization is in general and I'm 12 years into my career.
You have your own HN account and I will do nothing to prevent you from poking fun of whatever you want.
I struggled with vendor drivers for chipsets for years (yes this company too). They are generally awful. Most are warmed-over demo drivers from the original silicon vendor, intended to exercise chip features but no diligence to adhere to specs, protocols, handle (any) error conditions, be readable or supportable.

Vendor "support" for their driver means a third-string intern/student who hashes together patches that reveal profound ignorance of the architecture.

Its not just NIH; the chain of custody from silicon designer to you just doesn't include ANYBODY who has your interests/your customer's interests in mind. They are more concerned with making the driver portable across their product line, doing it cheaply, getting it to market at the same time their hardware releases etc.

Any robustness/architecture/responsible software processes have to be your business and yours alone. This probably means rewriting the whole driver, using the demo driver for reference but ONLY for chip-specific info.
Seems a nice Idea. Though not for me. I don't like the lack of control of my funds.

I don't think I'd be happy signing up for something like this because it seems like something haphazard that can quickly.

I think I'm too cautious with money for this to appeal to me (so obviously not your target market)

Incidentally, my gut response was: Who gets the tax receipt?
NASA Mars rover halfway to the promised crater
Care to explain? I've clearly missed something as I have no idea what you're talking about. We host with Rackspace at work and have no issue with cron jobs...
Agreed, except that all three branches of the government have a duty to uphold the constitution, not just congress.

I do, however, think there should be entities in a "common carrier" legal position: they have no legal liability for the content they carry, and they're required to offer service to everyone. Much as AT&T is not responsible for listening to my phone calls, and would not be liable were I to communicate a bomb threat, I believe pure network providers (bandwidth + routed IP address) should be common carriers.
It's difficult to say. I've worked at two companies that have used EC2 for various purposes. One had an instance that was used for dev work get "corrupted" on three separate occasions (I couldn't get the specifics, but there were definitely I/O issues with the instance storage), and the other has been using the same production box for more than a year.

The bottom line is that EC2 installations need to be designed as semi-permanent. My preferred strategy is similar to how Google talks about their hardware (when they do), that any one server can go down at any time, but the overall setup is resilient to failure.
I think burning Korans, or burning crosses, or burning any books certainly classify as violent acts. I doubt many people would argue otherwise.

By the same token, removing an organization's website hosting is also a violent act, though of a different and certainly less serious sort. If Rackspace (or whomever) yanked EFF's website from the web I suspect a lot of people would implicitly appreciate the violence inherent in that event.

I'm not trying to defend these scumbags, they are scumbags and what they are doing is wrong. But Rackspace is also in the wrong (though on a much different plane). The way to deal with assholes shouting hate on the street corner is not to kick the soap box out from under them and smash it with an axe. It may be satisfying, but it's ultimately unproductive.
Well, yes! Having an opinion as a way of self-appraisal is maybe understandable, but I'd never let it get in the way of anything I wanted to do. I'd just try and fail. I can't see a reason why I wouldn't attempt something I wanted.
There are a ton of number twos and threes on the internet. Quick sample: Bing, Yahoo!, Tagged...
Rationality is over priced. Some experiments indicate that people use rationality to explain things they did, for example under hypnosis they suggest you should open your umbrella at a party, then you do it and try to explain why.

In this case rationality is a false distortion of what is going on. Living and thinking is at a higher level that rationality. We can use computers, logic, maths and rules to improve our rational mind, but thinking is much more that rational thinking. Creativity and emotions play a vital role. Destroy emotions and you loose your memory (citation required), because memorizing is linked to attention and attention is linked to emotions and feeling.

As a mathematician I can prove a theorem and give a prove, but there is something creative in finding a proof. Sometimes our mind is a wonderful mind.
Try burning bibles and/or American flags down there and see how that goes.
And the MakerBot is not very reliable itself. I talked to Bre Pettis, the founder of MakerBot at MakerFaire and he said the biggest challenge they faced was "Uptime" they make a great product, but its kit based origin, and the buggy nature of atoms means you have to be fairly well versed in CS/EE/ME principles to successfully operate one.
To my (limited, I admit) knowledge of databases every one of these reasons was a reason to use CouchDB as well.

When the author got to the real arguments, he kept comparing MongoDB to SQL databases and the jab at CouchDB (and the other non-relational databases) seemed without merit to me.

I'm sure there are good reasons to use mongo over couch but I don't think they're the ones listed here.
This. So much this.

I honestly don't know if Terry Jones, et. al., realize that they are following in the footsteps of history's most ignominious figures and movements by doing this. I have to believe they are just ignorant of history-- willingly or not.

Its hard to believe that they've found a way to burn a Qur'an in a way that is offensive not only to Muslims, but also to Jews and Christians-- the two groups who are most portrayed as "at war" with Islam.
This assessment couldn't be further from what I think is the case: Keep building social networks -- there is a huge audience of people that love to interact with others online.

Additionally, this sentiment is contrary to what drives innovation. Nickpp touched on this with his AltaVista comment, but giving up this early in the game is not only stupid but is not going to happen: The market is too young and too rich to not explore.

Facebook may be a behemoth today as Yahoo was before Google. But Google innovated the shit out of one niche part of what Yahoo was doing and cornered the market, later taking over most of the parts that Yahoo sacrificed search to be good at. In the same vein, I have no doubt that there is going to be a replacement for Facebook -- it might not be a social playground or an explicit network, it could be an online reputation or identity platform, it could be a standardization of personal and social data -- but Facebook, like all things, will fade, change and eventually be considered antiquated.
Well I'll be hit in the face with a tire iron. Didn't see this one coming.

Now if only this happened two years ago, I'd have been running linux for two years.
Hacker News in Dots
imo the pastor is clearly wrong in what he is doing and he is unnecessarily insulting and provoking millions of people.

That said, I'm not very comfortable with Rackspace making arbitrary decisions on what speech is permitted and what is not permitted.If I were to host a political blog, I wouldn't want to use a hosting company that can decide to take down the blog because they don't like the editorial policy.
People who think this is a free speech issue wrt Rackspace are confused about how the first amendment works. The right to free speech, is not the right to a platform from which to speak. This was the law-of-the land before the internet even existed.

Back before Craigslist killed classified, news papers absolutely had terms which specified which content they would or wouldn't run.
I understand. I was thrown off by the word "unacceptable," because it often implies the existence of a mutual negotiation that may not be the case.

But moving along briskly, developing for a proprietary platform carries with it a huge risk of getting burned some day, but perhaps the question is whether you will make enough money beforehand to make the eventual burn worthwhile.

I would be surprised if there's ANYTHING Apple would put in that document that would get a lot of developers to change their minds. Many developers won't sharecrop the Apple orchard under any circumstances consistent with Apple's business plan, and many developers will take their chances and try to make money.

I take it you think there are some policies Apple could adopt that would sway you? And you think these policies are consistent with APple's direction but they haven't done it yet??
Diesel got a very bad rap in the US in the 70's and 80's because some engines were essentially derived from gasoline engines. Also, until recently, the US standards for diesel were very low with high particulate matter in the exhaust. High efficiency European engines wouldnt work with that gunk.
Ask me a question
I find it hard to believe that the Commander of US Forces in Afghanistan and the President of the United States would both criticize this church in public, yet neither would think to pick up a phone and call Rackspace. I am assuming that a year or 2 from now we will learn that Rackspace did receive a call from some branch of government. I can believe that the call was perhaps informal in nature. Perhaps an old friend, now in government, called an old friend who works at Rackspace. Perhaps they had a friendly chat. I'm suddenly curious if anyone in Rackspace management spent any time in the military. If so, it becomes easy to imagine how such informal contacts might be made.

And, then, I wonder if any part of the Federal government is a customer of Rackspace?

I say all this simply because it seems unlikely that the the Commander of US Forces in Afghanistan and the President of the United States would both focus their attention on this church, and describe their planned event as being a danger to the troops, and yet they didn't think to call Rackspace? Shutting down the website seems like an obvious pressure point, though, of course, not an especially powerful one.
We want to be as transparent as possible and thought of the same idea :) Automatically tweeting/fbing every donation you do and showing people how much change all their friends are making per month! Thx for the support!
"optionally" of course.

There are places in Christian literature that charity donations should be made generously but completely anonymously.

According to some, it's "Not Christian" to make donations and publicly declare that you've made a donation.
My sentiments exactly.

While your at it, stop making operating systems, Microsoft won.
Permalink: http://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/22739785428
"(boy remember when Classmates was the place to be?)"

No.
I don't think this actually changes anything? Apple still bans under section 1 and I think 10.1 any app that don't have a consistent iOS look and feel and behavior. The requirement to only use native widgets is still enforced.

So, either the app developer gives the app a native user experience; Or the middleware developer makes it so that any app using his middleware is always conform the guidelines? As far as I can tell this still rules out any simple use of the simple and generic cross-platform middleware layers?
Some very interesting advice. I especially loved the bit about talent sourcing; the more I talk to various startup founders, the more I realize how desperately people are looking for good talent.

Also loved this quote: "If you ask 100 people out for coffee and even ONE agrees to go with you, that’s one more coffee than you’d get by doing nothing. Net win."
> iPhone kills other phones now, but in 10 years an open alternative will do better.

Wait, really? Last I heard Android phones were way outselling iPhones. It won't take 10 years for an open alternative to iPhone to take over, it's already happening and will be fully complete and obvious in probably 1 year or less.
"but it reflects a sloppy-with-money mindset I just don't have."

It redirects the sloppy-with-money behavior into something that benefits you instead of harming you. A surprising amount of self-control ultimately boils down to that, differing only in the exact level on which they are applied. It is way easier to fool your bad habits or false ideations than actually eradicate them, and you've only got so much self-control to spend, as recent psychology research is demonstrating.
> hyper-small cars

The new mini isn't hyper small.
The original mini cooper had a 2m wheel base and weighed around 600kg. The new 'mini' has a 2.5m wheelbase and weighs twice as much.

Cars tend to put on weight in middle age. The clearest example is VolksWagon. Originally the VW Golf was a small 650kg cheap sub-compact, then as it grew into it's current size they introduced the smaller Polo which was about the size of the previous Golf, then as the Polo grew with each new model year they introduced the Lupo - which was about the size of the original Golf...

Mostly this is economics, as you add more features you can charge more for the car, so every year it gains features (safety or entertainment) - all of which add weight.

Then there was the realization by somebody in the early 90s that you could take a dirt cheap truck chassis, add a cheap minivan body and create a luxury SUV with a 50% profit margin.

Not sure why the US has such an aversion to diesel. You would think that as a man's fuel (after all it's used by trucks and tanks) it would be preferred to the girly fuel you put in scooters.