skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In more extreme cases, look at John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil. Rockefeller used to be the wealthiest person in the world ... We have checks in place to curb the anti-competitive forces of certain companies.

If anyone is curious about John Rockefeller, I'd very strongly recommend "Titan" by Ron Chernow, which is a very detailed and fair biography of Rockefeller. It's one of the more important biographies I've read for my own development as a person.

After reading it, I'm thoroughly convinced that the oil industry would've been much smaller and much more expensive without Rockefeller's work, and he was a genius about chemistry, engineering, distribution, and all sorts of things. Rockefeller is probably in the 10 Americans of wealth created of all time - oil prices fell a huge amount due to Rockefeller's leadership, ability to find talent. He paid people well and treated them well. Did a lot of philanthropy, and raised his kids really modestly too. They lived in a three bedroom home with his wife and six kids for a long time, treated people really well. His kids didn't know they were one of the wealthiest families in America until they were teenagers.

Really an amazing guy. I'd recommend that biography to anyone. I think most people, even people who strongly believe in social causes and regulation, will admire the guy a lot after reading his biography. He did a massively lot of good for the world.
First, the difference between a jab and an insult escapes me. But here's what I have to say to you: If you are being offensive, that's wrong, period. You can't go around being offensive and then dismiss your critics as being easily offended, that just doesn't wash. It's an ad hominem.

If you need an example, try calling me a nigger. I won't be offended, however I will tell you that you're being offensive, even if nobody who hears it takes offense.

Elsewhere you have tried to defend your point, and that is the correct line to take. If your point is valid, it is irrelevant whether your critics are easily offended. They are wrong. And if your point is invalid, again your critics don't enter into it.

Second, I don't care if an insult or jab is directed at me personally. Ad hominems poison the HN community. They create an environment where ideas take a back seat to things that may well be the staff of life outside the office, but are irrelevant to the business at hand. They create an environment where people who disagree with you expect to be insulted for their trouble. They may fear the insults, or they may simply prefer not to lower themselves into a mud-slinging match. Either way, the community loses their voice if they turn away from comments that contain insults or "jabs."

Therefore, I choose not to shrug and say "How rude, but since he wasn't talking to me personally, no biggie."

Your third point is not worth a direct response, except to suggest that having reached the rock bottom of rhetoric, your comments have begun to dig. If your points have substance, make them and defend them. Discussing the psychology or motivation of your critics is the age-old misdirection of playing the man and not the ball.

See how I respond to your words without making suggestions about what kind of person you are or why you write what you write? You defend your ideas without belittling your detractors elsewhere in this discussion and it is far more credible.
Can I get currus.ww.com -> 46.51.191.242?
Impressive! At first that seems expensive. But, $10,000,000,000 is a drop in the bucket compared to the U.S. national debt, which is over 1300x the cost of that tunnel at $13,611,792,550,145.
References/Confirmation at Tyler Cowen's site:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/10...
vipper.ww.com -> gilslotd.com
Thank you a bunch!
Thank you for your follow up. Clearly your experience is far outside my world. I've never heard of an outside consultant being brought in to second guess the company's "architect".

It seems like you mostly move among bad developers. I don't think your experience is relevant to most of the developers reading HN.

Obviously, a full rewrite not a good idea in most cases as Spolsky eloquently argued.

PS: I didn't detect any "defensiveness" (you know, the catchall passive-aggressive term that is used to use to imply that the other side has a weak hand without backing it up) in the post you were responding to. It rang true to me.
Yes, that's free.
I apologize for being overly defensive, but I've unfortunately lived through all of what I was saying. I do agree with your Janitor analogy in that at the end of the day you're paid to do a job. However the problem often lies in situations where developers are hired for their expertise, but they aren't allowed to utilize it to do the job properly and instead are just asked to get it done.

I guess if I hired engineers who were capable of doing a complete re-architecture of a system, but forced them to put in "ugly" code that is perfectly serviceable - I wouldn't expect them to be around very long. I don't speak for everyone, but I do strongly believe that those that do this for a job and paycheck will be fine, if not happy, working on ugly code to keep things going. Those that do this for the love it, whom in my opinion are often better programmers, won't. At least, not for very long.

Still, there is definitely merit to your statements, especially when it comes to devs dreaming of re-architecture and instead having to settle for a small change. I appreciate the follow up.
You should explain to him that you are just as capable as he is to take legal action which would put a nice big hole through his funding possibilities. Then, offer to either sign something that says you owe each other nothing and that you are free to do as you wish with the code you wrote. Or, tell him he can pay you to sign the NDA. If your product is good, it's probably not because of the idea. It's probably because of the execution. If he is willing to pay you enough so you can spend 1200 hours on a new product idea. Go for it.
I might get a flaming for this one, but here goes:

Yes, politicians in general have a reputation for lying, and often some do. Yet to me the lying is part of a bigger problem, few of the top notch people want to work in politics. Those in that league who join politics do well and don't lie so much. Those a few rungs below do. Instead of fixing their lying, shouldn't we be trying to attract the creme de crem into politics, even if it is on a shorter term?
Back in the day this would have been really cool for vanity hostnames when logging on to IRC.

I imagine a few people that owned short hostnames for that purpose made a killing flipping them years later.
Agreed. Being bound to GTK is no fun - I tried it on OS X and it was very sluggish and janky. Was very fun in Linux though.
Vipper is free, so that's yours.

You're welcome :)
> Back in the day this would have been really cool for vanity hostnames when logging on to IRC.

That's how this all started :)

> I imagine a few people that owned short hostnames for that purpose made a killing flipping them years later.

Yes, best investment they ever made ROI wise, most likely.
I'll admit, I'd rather swim in the mud with an AK rather than an AR, but if your AR (assuming it was issued?) was finicky enough to jam in humidity or because it hadn't been cleaned after an outing, then you had a bad AR. The direct impingement system pros outweigh the cons for all but the serious mudbath situations where you also forget your cleaning kit
The Database-as-IPC isn't that evil... If you're using PHP there are worse options.
Could I get e.ww.com CNAME waylaid.org? Thank you. :)
Ask HN: Any hardware startups?
I'd like to hear about hardware startups and your troubles and problem solving. Particularly if there are any IC manufacturers or fabless startups.

This is an area (EE and ICs especially) I was always fascinated by, but I have no practical knowledge about. Yet, I have several ideas which I would like to develop into a HW product (one of million ideas we all write down), but I have no one to talk about since I don't know any people that are experts in. My exposure to the area comes mostly through occasional scouring through IC manufacturers news/prs/blogs, eetimes and wiki (so it's nothing basically).

Is it possible at all for a small yc-like startup to break into an IC field at all (fabless like Nvidia or manufacturer area). Costs associated seem to be astronomical.
Check the length limit clause please.
At various times during the year, we're hip deep in graphs; much of binary software security analysis is done over the graph of edges joining basic blocks --- series of assembly instructions that end in a transfer of control.

I'll concede that the algorithms we get to use for this are pretty boring; pretty much Sedgewick's Algorithms-in-C level of sophistication.

Halvar Flake at Zynamics has a whole team doing genuinely interesting graph theoretic analysis of binaries, for instance to diff out otherwise-secret security flaws from Microsoft patches.
MacBook Air Apparent: I Have Never Used My Computer’s Optical Drive
Some tea leaf reading....

So, Google built GWT as an abstraction layer over JavaScript which has, fairly effectively (I do a lot of GWT work), made JS little more than a really poorly purposed intermediate form akin to Java bytecode. GWT's pretty fast, but it's certainly limited by the need to express its compiled form in a language designed for humans. It also, interestingly, has a facility for breaking apart a codebase into multiple components for loading in the background.

Now, enter Google's Native Client... It allows a program to be expressed in a very low-level representation (a subset of the x86 instruction set) and interact with the DOM/Event model just as does JavaScript (please fact check this). The Google folks are now working on using LLVM inside the Native Client so that programs downloaded over the web may be expressed in its bit code as a means of platform independence. Hmmmm....so what's the difference between a bunch of bit code and a bunch of machine generated and optimized Javascript? Still a lot, but we're getting pretty close. One would have to send his own infrastructure (garbage collector, etc.) along for the ride with the LLVM Native Client scheme, but that seems like a surmountable problem. There's even a project to build a JVM/CLI impl on top of LLVM (http://vmkit.llvm.org/).

Google seems to be working toward making the browser into a sort of X server, and they're attacking the problem from both ends...a SDK with a community around it in a widely-used language (GWT), and a sandboxed, platform agnostic runtime which will allow for a wide variety of languages/ecosystems to run upon it. With the exception of bleeding-edge games, whatever remaining value native applications for 95% of users will be entirely eroded. We can also observe Google's web printing initiative as yet another means of decoupling most people's computing needs from any particular full-fledged operating system.

What I don't understand is how Google will manage to get this scheme adopted as a standard. I believe Mozilla said they aren't in favor of it. And, Microsoft certainly won't play along until they risk having no browser marketshare without it. End users don't care that their computing experience involves DOM and JS -- they just care that it's secure and works well. As a developer, I'd love the freedom of building apps in a language of my choice (presuming it can compile down to the LLVM and run in the browser/Native Client sandbox.

Do people on HN think I'm nuts? Is the endgame of the web a universal application "player" as Microsoft has surely feared for over a decade? What is there to lose in such a scheme? One downside for Google would be that machine-readable content is required for search. But, search is so important for app/site developers that all involved would be willing to make accommodations (see Google's published scheme for allowing GWT/AJAX-y apps to be made crawlable).
You can't think of any ways Telmex could leverage its landline monopoly into advantages in the wireless sector? Or use an existing monopoly to prevent new competitors from gaining traction, no matter how well-funded?

Telmex charges exorbitant fees for any call that needs to connect to one of their customers. Given that they own 90% of the market, it's impossible to run a telephone company without letting your customers call Telmex customers. If you have to pay Telmex's fees, there's no way your prices to customers will be competitive.
I had the issue of not being home by my "sleep" time, but it was easy to fix - add a location check so it only goes silent (or turns on airplane mode) when you are at home.

I have a few rules that I now depend on, and don't have to check up on either. It takes a few days to tweak the rules, but ends up working very well.
That's awesome! We had some pretty crazy traffic over the years. The AE86 are also surprisingly expensive, but I think that mostly due to Initial D :P
Also, important to note that while 2 million pages a day sounds like a lot, it's around 23 pages/s if distributed evenly. If traffic peaks around double or triple that, it's still very feasible for a single server running a dynamic app to serve that.
You should check out Kogan. I don't know the guys personally but they have successfully built a hardware brand in Australia.
startupdisaster - I am interested in potentially featuring your situation on-air at "The American Entrepreneur". If you are featured, you will of course receive advice from our host, a 12 time successful entrepreneur, and potentially from one of our experts (we have many lawyers who often join us on the radio in these situations). Of course, you can remain completely anonymous. If you are interested please contact me at admin@taeradio.com. Below you will find some information about TAE radio, feel free to go to the website and check us out further if you would like.

Launched in 1999 by Mr. Ron Morris, TAE radio is a daily, national three-hour call-in talk show that exists to help entrepreneurs and business people of all types conceptualize, build, grow, and exit their own start-up. Some of the more recent and significant guests on TAE radio include: Robert Kiyosaki, Malcolm Bricklin, Steve Wozniak, Regis McKenna, Jason Fried, Dan Bricklin (inventor of VisiCalc, the world's first software product), Aaron Patzer, Steve Forbes, Ram Charan (the world's highest-paid business consultant), and many more. Visit www.TAEradio.com for more information.
I vowed that my next computer will not have an optical drive in it.

As for MacBook, you can make some use of that space with optibay http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/
Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria: The Facebook president
Yes. I played with the order, but forgot to adjust the WHERE clauses.

Here's the right version - http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/q/12795/
In the Pakistani northwest, there are towns which specialize in making knockoffs of guns. See, for example, Dera Adam Khel. There blacksmiths, using very primitive techniques, make duplicates of AK47s all the time. I think you underestimate the resourcefulness of a village blacksmith.
> Charles said “SproutCore is now and will always be totally free and open source. I think this business of charging for a commercial license is not an effective way to grow a project. Sure you make a little cash, but at what expense to the community? My goal is to make SproutCore and all of the developer tools that surround it totally free to everyone.

Sounds great, but I wonder how do the SproutCore guys plan to make money though. Anyone knows?
That's 10 bytes. Is it padded to 16 for alignment?
This post is especially relevant and worth a read given all the recent talk here of the facebook platform. I'll remain a skeptic, but the sincerity of this message gives me some hope that things really will change.

He phrases this as an attempt to regain "our" trust, which implies an understanding that they have lost it. I suppose this is the best we could ask for - here's hoping for the best.
There are definitely tons of awesome cars coming out in the next few years. I actually sold IC two summers ago to one of our good customers and he is the one currently running the operation. Christian and I are now in the middle of building websites and hoping for one to gain some traction. It's definitely cool to see importconcern is a recognized company!
Care to give a link (or an easily searchable name) for this "Mine car version" ?
Do You Know What is in Your Towels?
Gives a good explanation of towel fibers we use in out homes.
Thanks. From a glance ( http://www.kogan.com.au/profile/ ) it seems more like a trading company that slapped brand on hardware deals they got through alibaba.
Blu-ray DVD to WMV Ripper
I think the features are cool!

Now if they will only make some way for 3rd party apps to easily embed their functions...that would be perfect!
"Practice articulating positions you disagree with faithfully and persuasively. Unless you can do this, you’re implicitly assuming that people who disagree with you are idiots. Smart people understand why smart people disagree."

This should be taught to everyone from a young age.

"Individuals are the sole cause of anything that’s ever happened."

The most inspiring quote in the article. Reminds me of the Margaret Mead quote I have hanging in my room somewhere: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
There is nothing in the natural environment that can cause cancer.

Blatantly incorrect statements like this make me question the attention to detail of these researchers. There are numerous viruses, most notably human papillomavirus which are known to cause cancer. The sun causes cancer through large amounts of UV radiation. Both are natural by even the most strict definition o the word.

Until the advent of antibiotics and vaccines, you were way more likely to die of an infectious disease than anything else. There is just no way their sample size was big enough to overcome that.
Top Gear made two episodes on the Indestructible Hilux (episodes five and six of series 3). Worth watching.
The problem with small diesel trucks in the US, aside from consumer perception, is that certain states (e.g. California) have emissions regulations which make it very difficult to pass (particulates, nitrous oxides). Additionally, until 2008-2010, US diesel fuel was really high sulfur, which killed most emissions control systems. (the irony is now European fuel is higher sulfur). I think trucks under a certain weight had to comply with different emissions regulations (passenger car vs. truck), and without being able to sell in all 50 states, it was uneconomic to import.
Hmm, maybe we should have an IRC channel like reddit :).
It depends on the type of optimization. For page caching I definitely agree, not because it's a waste of effort, but two other distinct reasons:

First, because you might be papering over more fundamental issues performance issues that will still hurt you in the long term, and will indeed be harder to spot once caching is in place.

Second, because cache invalidation is quite often non-trivial, and doing it right may require a somewhat thick layer of code, and a certain discipline moving forward. This will slow down development if you are in rapid pivot mode.

However if your performance fundamentals are already resolved, and the business model is in place, and you expect the code to be around for a while, then putting the effort into caching will be amortized over many years and pay many dividends not only in server costs, but also in user experience due to fast page loads, and also in correctness because you will have time to get the caching right rather than scrambling to add it at scale and potentially serving stale data to millions of people instead of thousands.
I'm not aware of any of the battery powered cars that have been announced being set up for battery swap.

Meanwhile, AFAIK everyone has agreed on a standard AC charging connector good for 120/240 V, with the connector itself being good up to about 90A (it looks like Tesla is using it with a 50A rectifier, and Nissan 30A).

Nissan's 80% quick charge in 30 minutes connector probably isn't quite high enough wattage to 80% charge a 53 kWH battery pack (as is found in the Tesla Roadster) in 30 minutes, and I think that 80% in 30 minutes may be the magic cutoff for claiming the $5000 California tax credit for buying one of these things, which leads to the question of whether Tesla will have an incentive to get quick chargers introduced which will be incompatible with the initial version of the Leaf.

(As a practical matter, I think if these chargers max out at 500 VDC at 125A, that's probably good enough for road trips, though higher wattage might be nice.)
Building Your Essay Ideas
Good essay ideas are important to a well written essay paper. However, this is not the only element of a successful essay paper. There are other elements which students should be familiar with in order to be able to submit an essay of high caliber.
I guess you did not spot the irony.
can i have "w"
pointed to w.vidutis.com
Yes, that's the exact explanation patent trolls give, though in fact there's no real evidence on that being true.
As a counterexample, Poland did not do too bad. Or did it?
Hey - thanks for the comment. I agree with you on all points.

My concern is that these (flawed) techniques are being used by the people who claim to specialize in this sort of thing ;-)

We'll get there though...
Animal Hoarding Project
www.animalhoardingproject.com

Interesting Website!
Quả trứng gà hình quả chuối
Yep. sizeof(long double) == 16, at least for me on gcc and Linux. Keep in mind that different compilers implement "long double" differently. According to Wikipedia, MSVC++ just makes it a synonym for "double," but most other compilers on x86 make it this 80-bit "extended precision" floating point.
Facebook has for the most part burnt their bridge with me. I won't take client work with a significant Facebook component simply due to the risk of it.

However I welcome the announcement, and the possibility that over time they could improve the situation and win me back. It is truly a remarkable platform, and in my opinion would be perfect with just a little more stability, communication and responsiveness to bugs.
> Looking forward to more positive contributions from you in the future.

This might be my favorite comment by you of all time Jacques - very elegant way of dealing with that nonsense. I don't need a subdomain, but much respect and cheers for doing this. And jeez, I guess there'll always be critics no matter what - "inconsiderate ass hole looking for glory/karma points" - that must be ever so enjoyable to see after devoting a few hours to setting people up and helping them out.
leifleif.ww.com please, but thanks for the option :)
It's a 2nd gen device with OpenGL ES2, WGA res. and a 1GHz Snapdragon. It always gets the latest Android OS and will almost certainly run Gingerbread. Definitely viable as baseline development testbed.

Honestly, even if I wasn't dabbling in development, I'd still be happy with mine. It's a big chunk of change up front, but T-Mobile gives a discount on their data plan if you don't by a subsidized phone. My unlimited data is $30/month.

Only thing I'm not a fan of is the diminished reception compared to other Android phones.
It isn't a matter of being surprised that Mike Pall has contributed programs, more a statement of the obvious lest we forget.

Mike Pall is kind-of a good programmer, and that may well effect how the programs perform.
Thanks Jacques :-)
And then add in the bandwidth and the savings explode several times over...
I recently read an article about the text and ringtone scams in India. It's fascinating because I regularly deal with telemarketers on my cellphone in the US, but never any text spam even though I've had the same number for 7 years.