skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, I think there's a good deal of confusion about the appropriate axes - or at least talking past one another on these points.

If you take those data and throw them on a graph that looks more like Fred's, you get something that's downward sloping, but not nearly as smooth or severe as a power law curve: http://christinacacioppo.com/downloads/irrData.jpg

This isn't to say that one way of looking at this is better than another -- just that there seems to be two trains of thought right now.
You're also right, to a point. :) I suspect that at some point in the past, and perhaps even today for some limited set of careers (though none that would really apply to anyone on HN), the regular job and the infrastructure are at odds more often that one might hope. Given commutes, expectations held by 'regular' employers, etc., so much of this is incredibly restrictive in this day and age.

For your examples and how they apply in my city, at least:

day care - Fingers crossed you never get stuck at work late, or caught in a nasty rush hour, because your day care has very specific pick-up hours, will charge you big-time if you are late, and good ones may very well fire you as a client if you are late too often.

preschool - Pre-school schedules are not even remotely aligned with 'regular' job hours.

sports - As but one example, do you have any idea the hours hockey moms and dads (not to mention the kids) keep so they can take part in their sport? It's no wonder there are hockey parent fight breakouts from time to time. The parents are exhausted! :)

music lessons - This one isn't so bad, especially as kids get older, but can be much like daycare in that if you're late from work your kids either miss their lesson or are stranded afterwards.

I, for one, would much rather restructure my life so as to work from home during hours that I more directly control than work a 'regular' job. It'll be easier to take advantage of much of the infrastructure, and would eliminate my need to even utilize some of it at all.
What about the freedom and safety of being able to breathe clean drug free air?

edit: yay hackernews! Just downmod me because your liberal hippy viewpoints disagree. The chances of prop19 passing are 0.
Did they really burn through their $4.85M from their Series C in 6 months?
You conveniently left out the part where he called it an "almost" dead metaphor, which it isn't as evidence of their recent acquisition activity. That's what I was addressing.
> Prisons and prohibition perpetuate suffering.

No dispute whatsoever. I'm 100% in favor of decriminalization for these reasons and more; that's different than full-blown legalization, though. Remember the law of unintended consequences.

And in fairness, at least some of the gangsters you describe would continue to perpetrate horrors even if all vice laws were eradicated overnight. There's still plenty ill-gotten gains to be derived from extortion, human trafficking, organ harvesting, etc.

I suppose what I'm saying is that decriminalization is necessary, but not sufficient, for an effective drug policy. Remember that part of Portugal's successful program is getting as many addicts as possible into (state-funded) rehab/treatment. As the cops stand down, we also need the doctors to stand up.
Why Cesium Failed
"Also, since JavaScript has no formal classes there is no self-evident approach for structuring an entire application."

Really? http://javascript.crockford.com/prototypal.html
Actually the elimination of server side session reduces distributed application topology significantly. It is far easier to scale a stateless app than it is a statefull app.
This is so great. I actually look forward to the next time I need a really obscure winapi function. Apple?
The last thing this world needs is more people in positions of power who think that ECON 101 is all they need to know about economics.
You can do whatever you believe you can do. Don't let anyone try to tell you otherwise. Yeah it's hard especially if you have children and a family, but it is not impossible. It's only as tough as you let people make you believe it is. Starting a startup is difficult already, but if you have the brains, the will, and a true solution to a real problem you will win.
It took the longest time for me to understand what Drop.io did. And during most of that time I was a NYC entrepreneur.

It's hard to build a real company if no one understands what you do. Maybe they would have had a better outcome had they hired a CEO who could create & communicate a cohesive vision.

But that's just me.
There is a trade off in this sort of policy. Prohibition leads to organized crime and violence in the black market. It also leads users into a world surrounded by crime and illegality and makes it harder to deal with addiction. On the other hand, legalization can make drugs more available and possibly enable more users. Hard drugs like meth and herion are extremely addictive and damaging. Many people never recover once addicted and seldom lead normal lives. Marijuana on the other hand does not share these traits to the same extreme. I think the tradeoff for marijuana is clearly on the legalization side. As for other hard drugs, the tradeoff is less clear whether society would be better off.
Data's pretty tough on it, I think, hard to get people to self report unless it's addicts showing up for a $20 study. Anyone who knows better, feel free to chime in.
"Unless you are not a woman, it is unlikely that..."

Triple negative in one sentence (unless, not and unlikely)? I can't even figure out what this really means. You should get deposed by lawyers, you could blow their brains with your answers :-)
He moved back to Boston and I lost touch with him. Last I heard he got married, settled down and is still writing code.
The Market's Upcoming Reaction to Talent Acquisitions
In some circles (truckers and construction workers), use of meth can directly translate into less sleep and therefore more money. And yes, I still think recreational meth users would also still exist. Never underestimate the self-destructive capacity of addictive behavior/personality.
I can't answer for the grandparent, but I would imagine it has to do with how he evaluates the dangerousness of these drugs relative to the consequences of their illegality.
Will Bill Gates return to try to save Microsoft?
Dude. Stop it. He didn't mention unit tests. If you have a point, stop making stuff up about the posters you're responding to.
Coprocessors are in the upcoming releases of both HBase and Cassandra - they'll be back :)

It's not that there's anything fundamentally wrong with the relational model, it's that, as formulated, it's really hard to split up into multiple machines.
Make your website a traffic machine
> You don't think it's a bit niche?

Maybe, but there could be lots of niches. Actually I'd like to see it taken a step further where you can buy your own peripherals from different manufacturers and attach them to your phone. The device might not even end up being or looking like a 'phone'. But why not use a modern mobile OS as a controller for other mobile peripherals?
That's a quote about discrimination. I don't see how it applies; we are all being discriminated against equally in this case.
If you take the secondary effects of California legalization seriously - e.g. of policy changes in other sympathetic states, then it's a 20%+ cut in drug cartel revenue. How is that not a big piece of the puzzle?

And say it's just the 4% cut from California. Do those incremental hundreds of millions of dollars not count as major?
Yes, I agree that the solution is to throw more spindles at the problem.

PL/SQL, though, with global data reach and advanced locking states for every single transaction, make it really hard to move off of a single host. So it's more and more work to get more disks attached to that host, and CPU is a hard upper limit.
Stephen Fry narrating the chapter of his autobiography concerning Technology
There is also the chance that legalization in California leads to legalization everywhere.
pretty sure there are ways to consume marijuana or thc without disturbing others.

though your argument could be applied to cigarettes, and those aren't illegal...
Assume the position: TSA begins new nut-busting pat-downs
nude-o-scope just sounds too benign. We refer to the artistic, tasteful depictions of unclothed people in fine art as "nudes". The images captured by back-scatter x-ray bear no resemblance to the tasteful renderings of Titian, Michelangelo, Gaugin, etc. An appropriate nickname for the machine should be derogatory and characterize both the tasteless nature of the images produced and the abusive, exploitative process by which they are acquired. Personally, I think it should be referred to as the Porn-o-Tron machine.
Not only that: expensive regulation also protects those companies big enough to absorb the costs from disruptive competition by startups.
I agree with all of that. But the original poster was claiming 10k SELECTs/second on a 10TB data set. That just sounds fishy to me.

If your dataset fits in memory on one node, I'm all about using a database (prefer MySQL personally, might look at postgres now that it finally has replication).
You sure about that? I always got the impression the real problem in the camps, besides the fact they existed etc, was guards enjoying their immoral job and taking liberties. And that is indeed a whole step above.
It's a quote about standing up to tyranny, and the fact that if you don't speak up when someone else is discriminated against you may be next in line.

I think it applies very well in this case.
My husband and I quit full time jobs to build our second startup, whilst also having two kids to raise (8 and 6 years old). I don't feel like it's hard at all. I'm pretty disciplined, so I guess that helps. Perhaps I also see the world differently. But overall we're happier, we spend more time with our kids than when we were in jobs, and life is great.

I would also point out that the 'family business' is nothing new. Sure it may be somewhat different when you're building a business to scale, but there are plenty of examples of family businesses where the parents work huge hours and are also raising kids. Heaps of examples come to mind where the parents are literally managing the store 6 or 7 days a week, and somehow looking after children as well.

If you see 'having a family' as a barrier then it will be a barrier. Personally, raising kids and building a startup has never been an 'either/or' choice. In fact, since I love my kids and also love building a company... nothing could be better than having a life where I get to do both.
Intel, Samsung, Toshiba band together
I'm in no way implying you're making the slippery slope argument, but it seems to me there's a common fear-based subtext to this question in the America media. So, I'm going to try to address what I see as the slippery slope subtext.

I don't think there's a slippery sloper from marijuana to cocaine, especially if marijuana is legalized. The slippery slope argument is like arguing there's a slippery slope from beer to cocaine -- addictive personalities aren't that simple. Further, any evidence implying a slippery slope from marijuana to harder drugs becomes less relevant after legalization, since marijuana users will then have fewer interactions with criminals and less exposure to harder drugs.
You know, I have a hard time caring much about this issue. I'm just not that attached to the privacy of my clothing. I'm no stripper/streaker, but so what if somebody sees me with my clothes off? They certainly won't be the first, or the last.

Hell, it's just a little extra incentive to keep myself healthy, so I look good when I go through ;)
I think it might be possible. For an Aircraft carrier most of the cost is in the nuclear reactor, weapons, radar, and all the fighting stuff.

If you made a static rig that's only purpose was being a runway, I think it might be possible.
As a user it's definitely somewhat disheartening. It seems like whenever something cool/useful comes from a small, previously unknown team, there's a significant chance that it'll just be bought and killed by a big player. Both makes me more wary of relying on such services to begin with (even if they're paid!), and from a progress-of-technology perspective feels unfortunate. I'm sure it's great for the founders, but it's like big companies are using their cash pile to do the opposite of encouraging technological progress: find technological progress elsewhere, buy it, and axe it.

Things do occasionally turn out okay, e.g. Google allowed the EtherPad team to open-source the code after Google bought/killed it. And, although I don't personally use/like it, Dodgeball got more or less resurrected as FourSquare after Google bought/killed it.
Programmers are poorly disguised zombies
See http://blogs.computerworld.com/17250/bill_gates_will_return_...
for a bit of what looks like sarcasm, judging by the bad grammar.
mate was fly back to aussie from india and had a stopover in singapore.

malaria hit him and he ended up in hospital, ended up costing him many thousand of dollars.

yes paying for things like that are foreign to us but the point is if he was stopping over in kuala lumpur or bangkok then he would have paid much less for basically the same high quality of treatment.
For example: ODBC, ADO, DAO, OLEDB, ADO.NET... is seems, that there is no end to different data access layers.

Technologies, that went completely poof: Hailstorm, Passport, VB6(!).

Technology on the verge going poof: WPF.
You need to open an Etsy shop ASAP. You are providing the perfect answer to the very timely question "What do I get my boyfriend/husband/dad for Christmas?"
If anyone wants to place a link to the above comment on twitter, feel free to use this shortened URL:

http://urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com/mwf54
Depending on how this thing is used (job threads?), you could also scrape comments off of a thread page that satisfy a certain format.

e.g. someone posts

#HNdex
Title: Rails developer
Location: Montreal
#End

in a thread, they don't have to mess with their profile and sign up for your site (I wouldn't), and they get visibility in comments to people who don't visit your site without having to post twice in different places. Meanwhile you get free authentication and advertising every time someone does this.
The worst side effect of the drug trade is that it funds a worldwide network of highly capable smugglers. To them drugs are just an arbitrary material to be moved from point A to point B. Drug networks move terrorists, weapons, nuclear material, slaves and child prostitutes just as easily as they move bags of powder. But drugs are the smugglers' bread and butter. The other more harmful things are just the salt. But demand for the more harmful cargo is not sufficient enough to fund such a large and competent industry.

I worked in the MIL/INTEL world for a long time and a staggering number of really nasty things turned up amongst bags of powder all over the world. Drug networks are like VPN for physical objects. And drug producers would happily abandon that protocol for FEDEX if they could. The remaining market for moving things we truly cannot live with would be reduced by many orders of magnitude if we gave up on the drug war.
Ad buys. If you start the ads too soon you give the opposition a chance to raise money to produce and run ads. It's also possible the donations just weren't announced until now.
Facebook to hold mobile event next week
That's almost exactly the opposite of what this article says. To summarize it briefly, Vardi reminds us that the importance of proving P!=NP is to enhance our understanding of the underlying issues. Also, he devotes a significant fraction of the article to reiterating that worst-case complexity is not the same thing as tractability.

I'm not really familiar with protein structure prediction, but I don't think that it involves solving NP-complete problems. Scouring Wikipedia articles about protein structure prediction suggests that the techniques used are broad, varied, and distinct from the classical set of problems in NP. If someone's doing work in this area and is attempting to solve a problem in NP I'd love to hear it.
> If you don't like the way you are being taught, then find a better source for what you want to learn... [T]here are students who have taken that class before.

Why should other students do the teaching -- don't they have their own classes to worry about? Why would your students want to learn from other students, or from a website, instead of from an expert? And isn't teaching what they pay you to do?
Here's my thing like this for Ruby:

http://github.com/jedediah/prettyscript

I abandoned it when CoffeeScript appeared, but you might find something interesting there.
Re: performance and reliability.

Mongo has some pretty good performance characteristics, according to people that have very, very large datasets being updated at a massive rate. As for reliability, I personally don't really see to much difference in the reliability of Python logic vs SQL logic. It's like you're comparing the reliability of English vs Spanish.

"> Here's a neat trick - for every query SELECT * FROM TABLE, then filter and sort it in the application too."

Huh? Mongo (my personal database of choice) doesn't do that. You specify what you want when you run find(). No other database does either.

Again, if you have a point, make it. The last three posts you're written have been shoving words in to other peoples mouths, sarcasm and statements without any actual backup or citations.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/10/oregon-county-decriminali...
Google Homepage Circa 1997
Diaspora October Update
> I plan on filing a complaint at the first hint of an off-color comment about what they're doing. "Better get new gloves, Fred!" --- "I'd like your name and your supervisor's name, now."

This sounds like a good idea. Maybe I'll do this, too. I don't fly often, but this stuff really, really bothers me.
I haven't seen this before, and found the statistics at the bottom interesting.
Ask HN: Thoughts on idea to help novice developers bridge the learning chasm?
Background: In learning to program well and step beyond a beginner or novice level I think there exists a chasm. The web is filled with great resources for learning new languages but moving past the initial level that these resources help you achieve is tough. I see two current methods for self improvement:

(1) work with others who are more experienced and through osmosis you begin to pick up aspects of their developmental style and process i.e. how to approach a project and ultimately implement a solution (this is not possible for those that don't program for a living);

(2) hack on your own and through trial and error eventually find your way (good but perhaps not the best or only alternative).

Concept: I'm proposing a third option or hoping if it already exists. I would find it incredibly helpful if there were a resource that detailed the thought process and implementation steps that an experienced developer took in approaching a set of problems or projects. Even better I'd love to see two developers independently approach a set of small to medium sized projects, detail their thoughts along the way, and see how their development process and their implementations differ.

What do you think? Valuable? Does it exist? Worth creating?
Download SawVII Torrents: Torrent Finder: Torrent Search Engine
Marijuana and smoke are not tied together. Many people bake brownies. Some people smoke alone, so no others are affected. Vaporizers eliminate the smoke altogether.

It's not antisocial. In fact, it's one of the most social activities humanity has ever come across.
This sounds about three times better than existing electric car batteries. Does this mean we can put this battery in cell phones and laptops and get three times the usage?
> The idea that anyone has the right to regulate someone else's life based on morality is deeply puritanical

I'm saying nothing of morality, and speaking only of practicality. Absolute personal freedom is a beautiful ideal, in the same sense as world peace or the eradication of hunger; we should strive to achieve those ideals using every tool at our disposal.

But people (and societies) are extremely complicated, and in practice, one person's freedom can mean that another's is taken away. My freedom to play loud music at 3am removes your freedom to sleep soundly through the night. The premise of a social contract exists to seek a balance that maximizes freedom for everyone. Just because it doesn't always work isn't a reason to abandon the idea outright.

On the issue of drugs specifically, I think it's simply naive to pretend that easy and legal access to hard drugs won't have profound unintended negative effects on those besides the users themselves. I think we need custom-tailored policies for each drug that seek to strike a balance between personal freedom and the good of society (which is code for "the freedom of everybody else to not be fucked with by drug addicts").
Haven't you ever been sitting at home waiting all day for a package to arrive, only to find on the website that the driver reported "nobody home"?

Nope. Not once, ever.

But then again, I don't use FedEx Home Delivery, as they are not actually FedEx. (FedEx contracts that out to random local trucking companies. The express deliveries are the ones they handle themselves, and fortunately everything I get via Amazon Prime is either UPS or FedEx Express.)
Too often the decision masquerading as "best tool for the job" is in reality "the technology I'm fan of".

I really would not want to be the person, who few years since now is responsible for maintenance of some legacy Silverlight application. It is going to be exactly ugly as maintaing IE6 only application today. The difference is, that it is easier to avoid that now.

I really don't know what would make Silverlight best tool today (except for very specialized solutions). No, support in VS does not count.
Hopefully facial recognition is brought to mobile. Facial recognition along with a mobile camera could add someone to your social network with the snap of a picture.

Facial recognition article:
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/100705-095329
I do not understand. I do not see where the article suggests that all "real men" are in the armed forces.
Even Forced SSL is broken for Facebook Google Twitter
Taking comic novels seriously
An Update on Facebook UIDs
British Airways chief exec Martin Broughton seems to qualify: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5j8a4C...
Add/Remove Software From The Ubuntu Terminal
>If you have the job that forces you to feel up the crotches of children in order to encourage their parents to send them through a machine that takes naked pictures of them without probable cause of having committed any crime, then I suggest you quit that job.

Thank you for making my day. That is all.
That's great. Just for context, I'm taking the same stuff: whey protein (with dextrose and creatine), vanilla flavor.
These talent acquisitions always make me think:

The market's already proven by the company that was just bought. The company that was just bought is being shut down meaning 1) no market leader, 2) less competition in the market, 3) a bunch of paying users are going to be looking for the same exact same product to pay for.

Seems like the perfect opportunity for someone to create a startup to replace the one that was just bought.
Was the cockpit door on UA93 reinforced? I can't recall ever hearing/reading that.