skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pretty much what I use - a 15" Macbook and headphones, but I WISH I'd bought the matte hi-res screen. Oh, I guess he doesn't have an Ubuntu desktop, though. His loss.

I actually wear hearing protection ear muffs, though - http://www.amazon.com/Peltor-H9A-Optime-Over-Earmuffs/dp/B00...

Now THAT is luxury. Okay, so some people think I'm weird, but I really don't like background noise.

They're really awesome for hotels, too. Noisy air conditioner? Sex next door? People clunking the doors down the hall? Who cares! I can't even hear it! Oh man, I shouldn't have even looked at that - now I see they have the deluxe 105 model....
This appears to be a common scam:
http://www.mysears.com/Vizio-32-in-Diagonal-Class-1080p-Eco-...

This is absolutely disgusting. The product page:
http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_SPM1880500503P?mv=r...
has only a tiny indicator that this is offered by a third-party seller, and searching for the seller's email shows numerous other frauds.
Hmm, hadn't seen that before, thanks so much! I like how you can apply power to many things, not just financial or status. Interesting perspective he has.
Well, we've mostly eradicated very human-specific diseases. Some do also infect other animals, but we've generally targeted very specific strains and species that are pathogenic to humans. We haven't completely eradicated an entire family of bacteria, or large class of viruses, which seems like it would be more comparable to eradicating all mosquitoes of every genus and species. It doesn't seem that hard to imagine unintended consequences if we eradicated not only the plague bacterium (probably Yersinia pestis), but the entire family Enterobacteriaceae, for example.
Aside from the fact that this guy has produced some decent software, I can't believe that hardware/software configurations of random people is interesting discussion matter.
Ahhh, inches.

How quaint!

Now there's a hacker's challenge. Finally get the US (and whoever) to get with the 21st century. Yes I know this comment is sort of off-topic, well ... kinda - the article is about measurement. But honestly this thought wanders through my mind like a lonely guy at a single's bar whenever I spy "old-style" units. I'm going to be provocative here, but I think all the excuses all bull (they're more natural, yada yada yada) - basically the US (and whoever) think they are Numero Uno and the rest of the world be damned.
thanks for sharing the info
Is China gearing up to start World War III?
Yeah, I'd think so too, in general, but having a laptop with a good sized screen, quality keyboard and large, responsive touchpad sets my mind at ease and really lets me get work done.

The MacBook Pro touchpad is the only one I've ever used that doesn't leave me wanting to plug in an external mouse.
I liked the small satisfaction I got from 'X'-ing out spammy sites!
Thinking in terms of similarity rather than strict equality.
CakePHP from scratch: Baking with dependancy tables
But in the weeks or months before bidding behavior adjusts downward -- pure gravy for Google!
the term is widely used among the population, not just the black population, in the mid-atlantic up to new york, chicago, and the south.

Sometimes soul food is conflated with Jamaican food (jamaican soul) but for the most part when I think soul food, I think, okra, ham hocks/hambacks, collard and turnip greens, fried chicken, catfish, biscuits, gravy, cornbread, etc. I can't vouch for all the stuff in that wikipedia list, some of it I thought huh?

Since I stopped eating meat except for one day a week, a lot of that has gone out the window.
Only in the same sense that calculators are a tragedy, when the simple takes less effort, there is more effort left for the complex. The analogy of an externalised group brain is actually a pretty good one, and one may contribute to said brain as much as one benefits from it, to boot.
>I would be very interested to know what kind of benefits mosquitos provide to humans.

As ab9 said, they could be outcompeting other pests that host far, far worse parasites. If mosquitoes were to disappear, these other pests would multiply to take over the niche and we would have something worse than malaria on our hands.

Of course, I'm not sure if there's anything like this. There certainly are other parasites, but I haven't heard of any where the hosts compete directly with mosquitoes. Then again, with something as huge as nature, there is always something waiting to be discovered. For example, we have been in contact with the host species for ebola for millions of years. Yet, ebola first appeared as late as 1976.
Wakemate has got to stop lying in emails...lost all credibility in my eyes.

Lying? So you really think they make these blog posts and give out dates knowing that they won't meet them? That would be lying. I, for one, don't think they are lying.

Are they always off-schedule and could they better manage expectations? Absolutely. But I don't think they are lying.

Many of us have had projects in life that just went on forever...each time thinking that we're almost there only to run into another hiccup. In hindsight it seems obvious that we should just expect more problems and an indefinite date--but when you are actually doing something you are so excited to get out, you helplessly want to put a date time and again. I'd put the wakemate launch in that box.

My guess is once they do the initial launch, they will have plenty of information to make a more accurate prediction about future launches.
The Award For ‘Most Disgusting Woman in Britain’ – You Decide
Google juice.
> what i took away from it is this: speed is mostly relevant when there's a competing product providing similar value and you risk losing business due to inferior user experience

Even if you don't have competition, you leave the door wide open if requests take 5 seconds.

There's also indirect competition ... like a lot of people type the name of the service they want directly into Google's search box ... a practice which would stop if it took 5 seconds, because accessing your local bookmarks would be faster.
For approximately a quarter of the cost of small instances.

This may cut away at the incentive for people to start with Google App Engine.
About time...at $15/mo these are now a viable competitor to generic VPSes.
I did not start out hating it. The community has been an integral part of my life the last few years, such as meeting my best friend I now live with.
IIRC Jeff Bezos hinted at this when he spoke at Startup School a couple years ago
I think stating that your product "will ship no later than" when you know there are still some serious issues to be worked out is lying. Whether they actually know that they won't come in on schedule or just think it's overwhelmingly possible they won't, makes no difference to me.
Nice point. They really changed the background for ads.
Hm... I don't see AWS and GAE playing in the same ballpark at the moment.

I'm sure AWS will continue to increase the convenience and ease-of-use of their services, and GAE will continue to increase the breadth of their services, but right now they seem to be targetted at quite different app-dev areas.
I'm still using it http://compilers.tumblr.com/ because it has the best bookmarklet i have used so far. I even use the bookmarklet to enter free text posts without a link to the current page.
"We can always keep some mosquitoes in a cage in the CDC in the unlikely event that they do turn out to be useful."

Say we kill all mosquitoes in the wild, and then discover that they were in fact protecting us from some Awful Thing. By the time we become aware of this, it may be too late to eliminate the problem by simply reintroducing caged mosquitoes to the wild, because some irreversible critical mass or adaptation may have happened in the meantime. (This is a Black Swan argument; it's a vaguely-defined scenario that seems very unlikely but potentially catastrophic.)

"The cost of these infections is immense, both economically and in terms of human suffering."

No doubt. But what we want is a cost-benefit analysis of removing mosquitoes from the ecosystem. Pointing to one large and obvious benefit does not help us calculate the costs.
I'm not at all convinced by the "higher education bubble" articles.

There's a difference between a bubble and lack of price elasticity.

The stock bubble was different, because there are periods where stock prices are driven well beyond their inherent value by humans acting emotionally. Then the prices crash and get closer to their inherent value.

The same irrational behavior happened with housing bubble where speculative behavior driven by cheap (and irrationally given) credit drove house prices up to a level where there was no one left to bid up and speculators were left with unpaid credit and houses whose value plummeted, hence the crash.

Bubbles are tricky to predict before the crash happens. Just showing that a price of something goes up faster than income is not enough.

When oil prices hit the stratosphere not that long ago no-one called it an "oil bubble".

The fact that Apple computers consistently cost more than an average PC doesn't constitute an "Apple bubble".

Prices are still governed by supply and demand and there's another explanations for quickly rising prices of higher education: there was money left on the table and universities caught on to that fact and are rising the prices until they find a price that people are not willing to pay. Even then I don't expect a crash, as in dramatic reduction, just a small correction to the acceptable level.

I can imagine some structural changes that would lead to lowering cost of higher education.

1. Supply side increases i.e. more universities, leading to more competition for students and lower prices as a result.

2. Demand side decrease e.g. a mass change of people's opinion of the value of higher ed leading to massive drop in number of people applying to college and going to work instead. Or a mysterious virus decimating college-eligible population.

I don't see neither of those scenarios playing out on a scale big enough to change the fundamental supply/demand dynamic.

The problem with the "higher ed bubble" articles that I've seen so far is that they focus on one variable (cost of higher education raising faster than income) and making simplistic analogies to bubbles of the past.

They don't consider that those past bubbles had systematic changes that were the root causes of said bubbles and they don't provide data to show a systematic change that leads to unrealistically inflated prices of higher ed and how that systematic change is not sustainable in the long run.

High prices are symptoms, not causes, of bubbles. However, just because you cough, doesn't mean you have a flu and being gray doesn't automatically make you an elephant.

I don't see society as a whole suddenly deciding that higher education is not worthwhile or a sudden surge in number of available options or any other scenario that would alter supply/demand curve.
Probably personal tasks vs work/project tasks.
$0.03 * 24 * 30 = $21/mo?
Optical illusion lets you safely run over fake children
I think you misunderstood the OP.
The Linux instances are $0.02/hr.
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms#opaque
Amazon EC2 Micro Instances
Personally I find that if someone does something to me it can bother me for years. The worst part about this is that the person has likely long forgotten, so I'm the only one feeling discomfort over it.

My strategy now is to just express my discontent with the person as soon as possible. Then it doesn't bother me anymore because I stated my case. Paul's method might be better if you can pull it off.
> It's easy in the simplified mental model that you have constructed devoid of real world context.

I constructed my mental model based on the detailed description by a BaseCamp engineer of what he'd have to do in order to solve the problem in his system!

> I'm going to stop arguing now because you're not even responding to my actual argument.

Welcome to my world: you've been arguing this whole time as if I were claiming that BaseCamp engineers were incompetent when I've only been saying that I don't trust that they are competent.

> There exists a potential feature which could be implemented in Basecamp faster than in your product (and vice versa).

There are probably many such features. That's really beside the point, unless you're claiming some additional knowledge here that the decisions made in this particular design contributed to the ease of those potential features. If you're only assuming that because you trust the competence of 37signals, your entire argument is circular and depends on the very claim I'm contesting.
Don't forget the christian organizations that pay to send Jews to Israel since that's also a pre-requisite for the End Times...
They changed the background color. Ok. It is still quite obvious to me what is an ad and what isnt. Perhaps the old yellow was too subtle.. some people might not know that is an ad even if they switched back. What if they brought back the blink tag like:

<blink>AD!!!!</blink>
Maybe not as huge a deal for Linux instances, but this is HUGE for Windows users. There's nothing comparable elsewhere. The cheapest Rackspace Cloud instance is $0.08/hour for 1GB. There is no faster, cheaper way to spin up a Windows server than AWS now.
They're one of the factors finally pushing me towards just a default-block policy (the other factor is sites that pop something up when you mouseover a link). I've tried really hard to start with a blank adblock list and individually block sites that have particularly egregious stuff, but the whack-a-mole is getting ridiculous. Haven't quite given in yet, but if I don't reach a fixed point soon where I can stop adding 5 new things a day, I'm just going to subscribe to a blocklist.

I wonder how hard it'd be, alternately, to write a heuristic to block absolutely-positioned top/bottom bars. May play around with that a bit.
Maybe this is my own prejudice, but I think there's a big difference between practicing basic math skills constantly, and exercising critical thinking constantly.
I'm curious what's wrong with someone suggesting that you might be coming across as trolling.
> And given that Basecamp has millions of users I don't imagine their database structure to be pretty or normalized.

Millions of users is not really that many. It's certainly within the realm of what can be reasonably vertically scaled.
Hrm I don't see the option?

http://cl.ly/0430c3a3f00c59743368

edit: only appears to be available with certain AMIs
I'm not familiar with the research cited in the article, however it seems the author is making some inconsistent points refering to it.

He says there are two different ways of reading(ventral route and dorsal stream) and that the latter way is preferable because it is more conscious of the actual text being read. When reading on digital devices he worries that we will only be reading through the ventral route, because the clear display quality will make it so easy for us the read the letters and words.

Now, there is a few things I'm wondering about:
In practice, do we actually ever read through the dorsal stream?
In the research experiments quoted, this was archived through rotating letters or errant punctuation, both of which we do not usually encounter in actual books.

The author also mentions the dorsal stream being activated because of an obscure word, or an awkard subclause. This seems more like the thing that would in practice cause us to use the dorsal stream. Is the dorsal stream active in cases of difficult texts, e.g. scientific papers?

If that is so, then it seems to me that it is not so much a question of wether you read on a digital device with great display quality or a simple book, but instead it seems to be of much greater importance what it is that you are reading. A Dan Brown book, would probably only activate the ventral route on both mediums, whereas the newest P[!|=]=NP proof would probably always activate the dorsal stream.
Is my understanding of the ventral route and dorsal stream correct?
#3 is pretty important but from my top mistakes I would add:

* Don't hire/engage those guys that show up conveniently at a certain time just because you have too much work to do to really do a background check. Do background check. Very, very carefully, especially if they are prepared to work free for equity.

* Don't hire friends friends
This is a textbook example of Yahoo's problems as a company (I'm an ex-Yahoo).

It's all there: poor execution (performance/quality), insufficient focus on the user experience, focus on per-search revenue rather than long term search share, and above all no appetite for risk. Say what you like about Bing, but they are at least throwing caution to the wind and trying new and different things.
Except that you have to pay separately for storage, as you have to use EBS: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#instance
Can you use Microsoft SQL Server with Micro On-Demand Instances? The pricing doesn't offer a Windows and SQL Server Usage costing.

http://aws.amazon.com/windows/
It only works with EBS backed AMIs.
Yes but 600mb on a windows server doesn't give you a lot of room to play with. I'm struggling to think of a use-case but I'm sure there are many.
I'm wondering why a non-programmer uses Git.
Moms Helping Moms Start Their Own iPhone App Business
The hassle-free task management and collaboration app
Opera Mini 5.1 - Better browsing on Windows Mobile
Yeah, they're not going to run SQL Server. It's plenty for just serving up some simple stuff. I use the small instances mostly for testing stuff out with different configurations and running small short-term side projects. These will work perfectly for that.
You probably could, but that's not really enough RAM to do anything worthwhile with SQL Server. And you'd have to install it yourself it appears.
More likely WebOb or Werkzeug. Maybe Paste.
I have a lot of "darkness" around me concerning threading, but isn't it a net win even with the GIL if the threads are mostly waiting for IO to finish?
A comparable generic VPS might have 10-20 GB of storage, which only adds $1-2 to the monthly cost.
Don't forget that static IP is extra. All bandwidth is extra. Memory is at a fixed limit (some VPS will let you burst above your assigned memory). No software like Plesk to help configure the box. Those things can add up.

Edit 1: I mistakenly said that static IP was extra when it's not while in use.

Edit 2: Storage is also extra.
My main fear was that removal of mosquitoes would give rise to another blood-sucking, biting insect to fill it's place. One that wasn't so slow, noisy and easy to repel with nets, repellant and clothing. A smaller, silent, insect would be far worse. Mosquitoes are the b52 bombers of the flying insect world - slow and easy to hit.

I get bad reaction to sandflies. If sandflies replaced mosquitoes, my world would be severely negatively impacted.
"There’s no question that the government is resolved to at least try to re-create Greek civic life. The only question is: Can such a thing, once lost, ever be re-created?"

I reccomend reading Machiavelli's Discourses to anyone interested in the particular subject. He has put much study into this question.

To provide short answer - Niccolo believes that once the "civic virtue" of the state (and thus its citizens) gets corrupted it certainly is possible to restore it - but that he sadly cannot think of a single person that would be capable of pulling it of (it is such a monumental undertaking, requiring an honest person to commit some amoral actions - without succumbing to corruption of power).

Thus a more probable course of action according to Machiavelli is - that such a state (or nation) is condemned to "eternal" turomoil and/or domination from an other (more virtous) power.
The best option if you wanted to do this would be to install SQL Server Express since you're not going anywhere near the memory limit of 4 gig that that product is bound by.

That way you're not going to incur any licensing cost for SQL Server provided you can live with the DB having a file size limit of 4 gig.
I had a pair of Shures that I paid over $200 for. Every other earbud I've tried has been terrible. They're tinny, they don't fit right, and you have to blast them to get over moderate ambient noise. I worked in a fairly noisy office when I had the Shures, and I could turn the music down to one click over 0 and still hear nothing but music. The sound quality was also a lot better than just about anything else I've used (save for my $290 pair of over-ear headphones). I ended up losing them (or they were stolen, not sure) and just never replaced them. I mostly work from home now, and no one here is going to care if I turn up the speakers connected to my desktop.

Were they $300 better, or even $50 or $100 better? That depends on what your priorities are. Me, I've spent a lot of time and money collecting a high-quality music library, and I prefer to hear it through headphones that are transparent and don't lose detail. Your priorities might be completely different.
You can take the data without the commentary, though. The results actually fit nicely with a "pseudointellectual, tries to sound smart" stereotype I have about internet atheists. (I'm an atheist myself, but can't stand reddit.com/r/atheism types.)
Static IPs only cost money if you're not using them. For most small VPSes utilization is practically nothing. I'm not saying it will replace VPSes, but it's a valid competitor.
And what's happened to Zope since then ?
and, a reserved instance only costs about $10/mo.
That is exactly the position I'm in right now. Was going to use GAE but now I'm rethinking that decision.
A micro instance of their relational database service would be perfect for my use, but I guess the ram would be too small.
Didn't they do that once already?

I seem to remember that back in the days of DDT, mosquitos were killed back to the point where malaria was no longer a big deal. Then the 70's happened, DDT went away, mosquitos and malaria came back big time, and farmers in Southeast Asia started dying in large numbers because the insecticides they used to replace DDT were actually harmful right now instead of 'probably carcinogenic over 20 years'.

Anybody know what the insecticide of choice is today, and whether it's as safe as (or safer than) DDT?
nice work! I love seeing businesses which don't rely on big capital.
Maybe he uses it for his designs or his writing.
Yeah, the storage doesn't seem like a huge deal, but the bandwidth might be. A $12/mo VPS from prgmr.com gives you 80 gigs/month free transfer, which Amazon would charge you another $12 for.
If they don't know they won't come in on schedule, it's not lying. Sure, you can make up your own definition of any word.
Writing copy in the apps, updating and pushing new copy.
Seems that EC2 feels some competitive pressure...Yet a big move that kills the (superficial) cost-argument against the Amazon offer.
Digg actually had a similar problem a few years ago with pbwiki running on a subdomain:

http://www.phoboslab.org/log/2008/06/how-i-hacked-digg
Reserved instances (assuming you're going to use it for the full year, which of course is the big caveat) also bring the cost down to $0.007 an hour with an up-front investment of $54, so:

(($0.007 * 24 * 30)*12 + 54)/12 = $9.54 a month assuming you use it for the full year.

Edit: Also, as mentioned by _delirium, Linux instances are also $0.02 an hour. I did the Linux calculation but the same one with Windows goes at $0.012 per hour.
Sure there's quite a big difference, but it's the same basic idea, a concept which through independent enquiry may only occur to you after period of time x has elapsed instead is presented to you in a shorter period of time than period x.
That doesn't necessarily mean you don't critically analyse the presented concept, or that you don't analyse other aspects of the problem space merely because you have neatly parcelled answer handed to you, it's just a single aspect which you did not independently need to construct.