skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Engineering the extinction of this kind of hugely prolific and adaptive species looks to me like a mind-bogglingly hard problem, which the smart people linked to in the post are not directly working on (they're doing local control with superfancy lasers and possibly poisonous bait, so will probably only be offering sexy alternatives to mosquito nets and sprays). A possible approach would be to introduce mosquitoes that have a big competitive advantage over their peers initially but are ultimately (a few generations down) fucked, but to date I think humans have only figured out how to do that kind of thing with investment banks. (A hematologist friend once told me of another possible approach he thought might well work, but I was a bit drunk and he was speaking Greek, and in any case Gates said no.) A promising alternative that would render moot concerns about the eco-dangers of wiping out the mosquito would be to genetically engineer mosquitoes incapable of transmitting the parasite. That's apparently been done, but without the new safe mosquito having the survival advantage needed to dominate the species. See following, with footnote link to original paper: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100715172002.ht...
Usually but it depends on a few variables and it's not always worth it.

Because you're not used to it, high end equipment doesn't sound amazing in comparison at first - just oddly different. (At least not in a $400 to $100 comparison - the biggest difference is going from $10 to $100.) Once you're acclimatized, though, it's really hard to go back until your hearing naturally degrades and you're stuck buying high end gear.

So the rational approach is to never buy high end headphones or earphones at all and instead aim for the highest quality stuff under around $150. It'll get you 90% of the way there and stop you becoming an audio freak chasing an expensive pipedream. Almost no-one will give this advice, though, since audiophiles want to rationalize their purchases and reviewers or stores want you to buy their crap.
I believe that is an understatement - we are properly the single best species at that.
I think if your writing more than a couple template tags and for simple things you're doing it wrong. I would really limit templates to being primarily HTML. Put any advanced python functionality in your view function, Django templates are minimal and not for making queries like other templating systems (a good thing IMO). If you need to do anything crazy advanced like recursively display stuff for items, don't write a template tag, use a simple include tag to insert HTML for subelements. Using the include tag when possible is also great for AJAX, as you have the HTML for a subelement sitting in a file if you want to render just that to return to a XML request.
Google Spam Fighter Matt Cutts Weighs In On The “Death” Of SEO (Or Lack Thereof)
Google Instant Search is just too distracting.
Anyone got any ideas why the strangely specific size of 613MB RAM?
is he and the plan 9 gang still at google?

would be interesting to see if he moves to the android area and have to rethink all that, realizing that he is still stuck to the PC market, which is being eaten faster and faster by the mobile market.
This might just make me replace the Slicehost instance I use for Mercurial and build server. Elastic IP + EBS + micro instance makes a pretty nice low level machine.

It always bothered me that for a development server you are basically overpaying for bandwidth. Who cares I have 450GB bandwidth when I use maybe 30GB per month ?
I notice that, in a sense, AWS proves that the Total Cost of Ownership of Windows infrastructures is higher than the TCO of Linux infrastructures.

Amazon charges more for Windows instances across their entire offering. A Windows micro instance costs 50% more than a Linux micro instance ($.03/hr vs $.02/hr). This likely reflects Amazon's statistical studies on their EC2 datacenters that a Windows stack (OS + apps) uses on average more resources than a Linux stack, therefore more power costs, cooling costs, etc.
TED founder R.S. Wurman
YASHP! Yet another self-help post.
I would not rely on our "mass intelligence" to be our savior. The behavior of masses is dominated by factors which are far far away the 'rational' choices and the best interests of whole communities. This is why we always talk about "if only we all did X", and the reason everybody in the pub knows the solutions of big social issues ("the solution is so simple, just do X") is because people assume that we can control ourselves and behave coherently as a group.

Yet people find easier to think of the problem from the other side and think that a bunch powerful people who bend the world to their own interests. It is true, there are those people, their effect is significant, but they are part of the game, they cannot control even themselves and their peers, not even when it would be in their interest (as a group).
Basic HTML/CSS and marketing copy.
Enjoy that feeling. You have a similar setup to a multi millionaire who's not ignorant about tech.

It's notable how he sticks to his principles. I suspect I'd have 101 bizarre high-end computers and clusters around the place if I were wealthy, though this is probably why I'm not ;-)
"The loose observance of laws" and "tax evasion" are one and the same.

A big point I get from the article is that everyone is just looking out for themselves, with little regard for law or society. Want to pay less taxes? Fine, vote in the local version of Thatcher, but don't cheat. That leads to a system where everyone picks and chooses which laws they want to follow.
I signed up for Rackspace Cloud Servers because I've been more used to traditional hosting, and switching to AWS would (I believe) have been a step too far for my abilities at the time, and I have to say, it's been nothing but great.

The knowledge that there's a really good customer service team behind you is comforting when you're bootstrapping, and the ease of getting a new instance running is great!

As for the results of the test - I'm surprised somewhat. I don't know why, but with the number of startups using AWS, I would have thought it'd have been the better choice for performance issues (maybe the number of startups using them is the problem).

The cost comparison at the end is interesting for Cloud Servers vs EC2, but it does appear that S3 can be cheaper for a lot of people than Cloud Files when at scale.
Sure - but you won't generally find them in the outsourcing departments.
I pretty much agree with all of the points raised here about Django, and I've been using it professionally for almost 3 years. The core development team is incredibly hostile to improvements that don't fit some fluffy definition of where they see Django going, to the point where some of the best coders I know are incredibly discouraged from contributing patches or improvements, and just release their stuff on GitHub instead. That's the wrong way for an open source project to be, in my opinion.
I can second Nagle's book. They could charge its weight in gold, and it would still be worth every penny. Where Davidson's freebie gives you the lay of the land on pricing and talks a bit about some dynamics, Nagle's "Strategy and Tactics" covers the details in some depth. You learn how to deploy pricing as part of your marketing strategy. They not only back up their points with detailed examples, but they explain why the pricing worked (or didn't) as it did. Simply invaluable.

For the OP, I would also recommend "Blue Ocean Strategy": http://amzn.com/1591396190 . The authors address how to move beyond mere competition, and pricing is one of those ways.
You can grab those shures for just above $200 on eBay. I got them but if I could go back in time I would have gotten something cheaper, or a headphone instead.
Hollywood Hiring Cyber Hitmen To Combat Piracy
All I would mandate would be that pants labeled 10 inches would be ten inches.

You want to sell Venti pants - go ahead.
I'm not a fan of the provided definition of "bubble" as it's a purely statistical definition, free of any causal factors. You know there's a bubble when you see it pop; the boom is inflated by the misallocation capital which sows the seeds of its eventual bust. The best one can hope for it to look for things which cause systemic misallocation of capital within a market.

Without claiming there's a bubble, I do find it interesting that factors leading to the misallocation of resources in the housing sector -- near-zero interest rates, government-subsidized/guaranteed loans, an "everyone should be able to own a home" political mindset, etc. -- very closely parallels the current situation in higher education. The only thing missing is the ability to securitize college loans, leverage them to the hilt, insure them, and then wait for the eventual government bail-out when the music stops.
O'Reilly Editor Simon St.Laurent's Picks for The Next Web (10 * $9.99 ebooks)
I figured that was implied because (hopefully) nobody else would know about Instant when it was in the prototype stage. Plus the whole "that I work in..." part of the quote.
Until recently, one of the biggest publishers of such microdata (in its earlier incarnation, microformats) was Upcoming.org, an events startup acquired by Yahoo.

Gordon Luk, the lead engineer, wrote an excellent post describing his frustrations with microformats:

[...] my experience with being a microformat publisher
has shown that things are exponentially more complex
than they let on in the “sales pitch.”

-- http://getluky.net/2009/01/08/a-warning-about-the-real-cost-...

HTML5 Microdata seems slightly more rigorous and abstract, but still, commingling presentational HTML with an informal data API is just asking for trouble.
Tried it with SQL Server Express on Server 2008, pushed RAM usage right up to ~530/613 MB before even starting SQL Server.

Regardless, I'm glad to see the offering. Was looking for something similar and with the bar of entry constantly getting lower by competition rising, am sure it'll find a niche.
I imagine the price difference also relates to licensing costs for Windows instances. Also, TCO is more than just compute efficiency, although the latter is important in its own right.
Someone has to make a decision and since here that person is a django-core developer, I'm not sure there's much to argue with. If they don't want to do that, bug will get marked "won't fix" every time it's created.

What else do you propose developers should do? I may disagree with this decision, but someone has to lead the project.
In the US a "director" is anyone on the board of directors.
Who said amazon charges according to what is costs them ?
Infact, I CAN say, that, according to the market, windows is better than linux and hence amazon is charging more for
windows machines.
The spot prices are very low for the new Micro Instances. For Linux servers they are currently at $0.007/hour (about $5/month).
If you're over 35 don't bother, your ears will have deteriorated too much due to aging. Under that it might be worth it, the younger you are the better your ears. Try them before you buy them, and try a bunch of them in different price ranges it's not pocket change.
So, when Gates bought 150M of Apple stock in 97, was he betting against himself?

Pretty much, yes. It made him seem like less of a monopolist.

Worked out to be a winning bet for Gates.

That's what happens when you bet on every horse in the race. It's something that Microsoft does a lot.
You are obscuring the difference between not declaring exact sizes and declaring false sizes.
It proves the part that wasn't in dispute. That is, that free software costs less to purchase than licensed software.

The TCO debate centers around the labor required to set up & maintain one versus the other.

That, incidentally, is why I run Windows on all my EC2 boxes.
What is the difference between me-too and competition? Or is competition suddenly unhealthy. If the original company is so much better than the upstart, they don't have anything to worry about.
OK, come back when you have done something moderately more "crazy advanced" than recursion.

> not for making queries like other templating systems

WTF ?
People think that if they emulate successful people they will be more successful themselves. So it's about a form of fashion.

'X uses brand Y hardware, that must be a factor in his success, so if I buy brand Y as well I'll stand a better chance at success'

Never mind that 'X' would probably make a go of it given nothing but a teletype and the people that emulate 'X' couldn't make good use of a cluster with 50 nodes and a wall sized display.

It's not the hardware that matters, it's the guys & girls using it that make the difference.
WTF does this have to do with Hacker News?
I like repoze.bfg as well. My point was that Zope has dropped in usage and mindshare in the last 5 years, and the community was unable to prevent that (for technical reasons, the Zope2/Zope3 confusion, easier frameworks like Django, etc).
Android Is As Open As The Clenched Fist I’d Like To Punch The Carriers With
Poll: What would you like to see first in a P vs NP series?
I'm about to write a series of posts/snippets about the P vs NP question, but there's a lot to write. Specifically, there are several components, and with a little work I can make them mostly independent. By way of an experiment, and since the HN crowd are representative of a large portion of my intended audience, I thought I'd ask which components you'd like to see first.

I won't necessarily do them in this order, but it would be useful for me to see an indication of what you'd find most interesting.

Thanks.

ADDED IN EDIT:

Please, if you read this and take the time to vote, please also upvote the item so others get the chance to see it. HN has become sufficiently popular these days that there's enough volume that items disappear quickly and don't get seen unless they get a few upvotes. I think that's a minor problem, and would be interested in possible solutions to it, but that's another discussion.

Thanks.

FURTHER EDIT: Added "Don't care, wouldn't read it."
What does "NP" mean?
What is "NP-Complete" (NPC)?
What does it mean to say problem A is harder than problem B?
What are some NP problems, and why are they hard?
How can you show a problem is NPC?
Prove that graph 3-coloring is NPC.
Sure. They probably followed a similar reasoning (example with fictional numbers, but probably close to reality):

* They have 64GB RAM hosts.

* They want to dedicate only up to 85% of the RAM to the Xen instances (keep 15% for the host OS, buffercache, etc).

* The Operations/Management team decides to target an overall rate of $1.82/hr per host to achieve desirable profits.

* The AWS marketing department has a requirement that instances be priced $.xx/hr (no fractional cents) to evoke "simplicity".

* At a first pricing attempt, they see they have the choice of charging $.02/hr and assigning 65536 * .85 / (1.82 / .02) = 612MB per instance

* ...or charging $.03/hr and assigning 65536 * 0.85 / (1.82 / .03) = 918MB per instance

* They select the first option (612MB/instance) because it is deemed sufficiently smaller than the existing "small" 1.7GB instance offering, whereas 918MB was not small enough.
Ultimate Ears (now a subsidiary of Logitech) is pretty well known for their custom in-ear monitors. Prices go as low as $399, not ludicrously expensive. I've never used them personally, but others seem to be pretty well chuffed by them.

http://ultimateears.com/en-us/products/custom
This study was sponsored by Rackspace... I think the end results are questionable. Here is a study I wrote comparing AWS, Rackspace and some other cloud providers using some more standard benchmarking methods: http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchma...
How to track Google Instant in Google Analytics
>How do we fix things?

Simple, stop doing the things that result in misallocating capital into the higher education market, the boom half of the boom-bust cycle. For example, ending government guaranteed college loans would instantly make private lenders more wary of handing tens of thousands of dollars over to an Art History major with a 2.0 GPA. Of course this would result in fewer people going to college, a necessary feature of mitigating a bubble.

Simple things are not always easy.

Large swaths of our society think everyone must go to college to succeed in life. Apparently the media and political elites who foment and abet this notion don't know how much a plumber makes, especially when your water heater breaks on a Sunday morning.
Note to self: don't ever give into the temptation to work on consumer hardware.
Surely the whole idea is flawed. It's as useful as internet polls are.

Once any site like digg/reddit/etc gets big enough to be worth gaming, it will be gamed.
Reddit is spending $10k a month or something silly on servers, and asking for donations to be able to keep going.

I wouldn't hold Reddit up as a shining example of a success story just yet.
I know it has probably been said a million times before, but I have found that in many contexts, trying to tackle problems in a purely-functional style has helped me immensely. To that end, learning languages like Scheme and Haskell forced me to think of programs in a more algebraic fashion -- so many things can be accomplished in a concise, readable, maintainable fashion using basic functional concepts like function composition/bootstrapping, closures, and higher-order functions. Furthermore, because much of it is typically referentially transparent, code written in this way is often fundamentally "safe" in the sense that it lacks side effects, making it much less likely to segfault or do catastrophically bad things.

Thinking in a functional fashion also made it easy for me to pick up JS and start writing event-driven code almost immediately, because so much of modern JS relies on proper understanding of closures and asynchronous events. Furthermore, if you find you like functional programming, I also highly recommend teaching yourself Church's basic untyped lambda calculus; I found that it helped give me a much better understanding of the basic underpinnings of so many languages. Similarly, having an understanding of the fundamental concepts that underlie all programming languages -- such as the differences between call-by-value and call-by-reference, or static and dynamic scope, or the various kinds of OO systems (prototype-based, class-based, mixins) -- is really important. My knowledge of these has not only made it really easy for me to pick up and learn a language extremely quickly, but has also saved me on more than one occasion from a pitfall that I would have otherwise made (such as forgetting that older versions of Perl use dynamic scope by default).

Also, as many other people here have mentioned, coding up solutions to problems from ACM competitions, Project Euler, Google Code Jam, etc. is a great way to get good at just coding. It is also a great way to familiarize yourself with a language.
Ask HN: What do you like or not like about the Kindle's highlight feature?
Do you actively highlight passages as you read? Do you click to read notes attached to highlights? Or do you just read the highlight a bit more carefully since it's underlined?
Reddit also likely makes a miniscule fraction of the revenue of Digg...
I, entrepreneur: Ten lessons for survival
Here is a Geekbench benchmark report for one of these new micro instances: http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=287891 . It uses the same E5430 processors as the other m1 instances. CPU performance is about 2x m1.small based on these m1.small Geekbench results: http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=241412 and comparable to a rackspace 4GB server I also benchmarked: http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=243138.
Why is it not possible to get Small Standard instances with 64-bit architectures?

This is the only instance that is missing 64-bit.

Even Micro instances offer 64-bit.
>it means something more than just prostitution

And the prohibitionists love to use this type of package-deal language. That one can oppose criminalizing sex for money between two consenting adults, but still support criminalizing sex slavery is a notion intentionally excluded from the conversation.
ZeroMQ and Clojure, a brief introduction
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/x/hardware/enterprise/x3850x5/...
I've experimented with earphones from £5's worth all the way up to £230 odd for Ultimate Ears 10vi triple fi pros (I've also tried Shure SE530's and feel the triple fi's beat 'em).

The difference between the triple fi's and basically any other earphone is actually pretty astounding. The main difference is clarity; though it's a cliche, it really is a case of hearing individual instruments, etc. (though you need high bitrate for this obviously).

It is, however, an extremely expensive hobby (and you can't go back). Another great thing about the triple fi's is that you can replace the cable. Since the cable is usually the failure point of any set of earphones this actually makes it quite economical compared to, say, £50 earphones you need to replace far more often.
> Now I just use the laptop screen. One screen all the time. I also like the smaller screen because it forces me to make better use of the space. I found myself getting mess on a 30".

Last year I bought the 13" MBP and a 22" LCD, but with the new higher-res screens on 15" MBPs, I think this is the way to go. Same setup wether you're at the office or in a coffee shop. Next time I upgrade I'll definitely get rid of the external screen.
Evolution, why DDT wouldn't work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Mosquito_resistance
self discipline and consistency.
c1.medium is also available only in 32-bit
What they did wrong is to promise a deadline after missing _all of their previous deadlines_. You don't do that! (especially if you are relying on something that is apparently outside your control)
The difference is that Bing has nothing to lose and everything to gain. They'd probably be a lot more complacent with Google's market share.
A friend of mine uses this. As long as you don't kick the phone on the floor during your sleep it ends up cheaper :)
The thing that worries me, and the thing that I think no-one has mentioned (apologies if you have) is that when did we have the right to exterminate a whole species just because it makes our lives uncomfortable?

I'm well aware that malaria and other diseases carried by mosquitoes are a very large killer in parts of the world but why aren't we trying to cure these diseases rather than wipe out a whole species?

It just seems as if we, as a species, think we rule this planet so can do whatever we want with regard to the other species that exist on it.
Benchmarking of EC2's new Cluster Compute Instance
Lessons to be Learnt from the Pompous Businessman
That's true for UK companies too - there can be (and often are) multiple directors. In fact, unless there were a lot of founders, I'd expect all of them to be directors, at least initially.
Ask HN: Twitter spam: what's the purpose?
Recently I've noticed an increase in the number spam tweets that link to my site and I'm not sure what the motivation is.

Are they simply trying to reduce their spam profile by linking to legitimate sites to make them less likely to flagged as spam by Twitter, or could there be something a little darker going on?

An example tweet is from twitter user @MZoASTEFUb:

"@jylan gonna stand there and watch me burn but thats alright...LOL JK, Im gonna stop drop and roll! itstheteenlife http://bl.inc.gs/xSC8B"

The bl.inc.gs link redirects to my site. This was brought to my attention by the target of the tweet @jylan.

Any idea what might be happening here?
The Top 5 reasons why Top 5 lists suck
as the Italian comedian Corrado Guzzanti pointed out, True Believers are not only Pro-Life but also Pro-After-Life

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg5pSwsHni0
Dear Anatoly

Re:Premature optimizations. I believe the great Pele offers something to cure this... it might help you.

:0P