skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a tough question. We all agree that marijuana should be legalized and sold in a regulated way, but what about the other, way more dangerous drugs?

This may surprise you, even shock you, but heroin is actually legalized, and given out by the government, in a lot of European countries. Addicts visit a special office and get their daily fix administered by trained professionals. I think this is the way to do it for heroin.
Heroin in itself is actually not as insanely dangerous as portrayed. Sure, it's a really really bad drug, but just like morphine, it can be administered safely. The most dangerous thing about heroin is actually not the heroin itself, but the contaminants and unclean administration. The high price of heroin creates a lot of crime, in places where it's not legalized the addicts either have to steal, prostitute or push drugs to afford their own usage. Stats have shown that legalizing and incredibly strictly regulating it reduces addiction, crime and recruitment of new users. Nobody sane wants to try heroin, almost all the recruitment are done by the addicts themselves pushing it to other unfortunate people. When they don't have to spend their days working on getting enough money to buy their next fix they actually can have normal jobs and working on escaping their addiction.

I don't know how to handle other dangerous drugs such as cocain, meth, amphetamines and lsd. Mushrooms and MDMA should be legalized, but way stricter than marijuana.
Totally different use of the term "virtual machine". You're talking about a virtualised execution environment, or hardware virtual machine (as executed by virtualbox, xen or whatever); he's talking about a runtime virtual machine (like the CLR, JVM, or Dalvik).
As gdl notes, your written English is very good: there's two non-idiomatic usages (was in "was living abroad" and texts in "writing english texts") and in your previous comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1683335) I simply can't tell your not an native English speaker (well, "landmark" is probably an incorrect usage since by definition it doesn't sound like you have been or can be very influential).

Elements of Style is the first book everyone suggests, although I didn't find it all that useful when I got around to buying it. I'd suggest checking it out and then later getting more prescriptive books.

While I'm not sure I'd recommend it as a second or even a fourth book, I'm rather fond of the rather old fashioned (OK, it's a century old...) and most certainly not American The King's English: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King%27s_English

There's an on-line copy of the 2nd edition linked in the above that should give you an idea of if and when you want to try it; at the very least you should try this bit right now: http://www.bartleby.com/116/101.html (well, I love it...).

My copy is this recent printing of the 3rd edition: http://www.amazon.com/Kings-English-3rd-H-Fowler/dp/B0015NYN...
is this a plausible org chart/cap table for a startup in a novel?
OK, 17 years ago. I learned Windows NT internals, and the Windows message pump, etec... Almost all of it still is useful today. Probably the only big discontinuity has been .NET, which has been going strong now for about 8 years.

All the technology is pretty much incremental built on top of those two. I find it more daunting to keep with video game controllers than I do software development technology, whether on or off the MS stack. Not that I know everything, but I've never felt like I'd wasted my time learning anything related to software tools.
I meant I feel bad for them because they're expected to crank out an Android/iOS competitor in an unreasonably short period of time. For some of them, this is probably the crowning achievement of their programming careers, yet people like us are sitting around complaining because they don't have a feature that took iOS developers quite a long time to bring to market.

I certainly don't feel bad for them in a general sense. They're probably paid pretty well and I would imagine they have an otherwise great working environment.
It's just decriminalized in the Netherlands actually, the coffeshops are tolerated, but not legal. Producing marijuana is not legal at all.
it's intended to be somewhat dysfunctional but within the realm of plausibility ...
The Sport of Business - Mark Cuban
Yes, but a battery backed write cache will turn random IO into sequential IO eliminating this '500 IOPS' barrier. Put 512 MB of BBWC into a system and see how your 'random IO' performs. The whole point is that NO ONE scans their ENTIRE dataset randomly, if you have to scan your entire dataset, just access it sequentially. Plus, nothing in NoSQL solves ANY of the points you are outlining.
Clojure Conj - Recovery
While it is true that a start up needs to get a product or prototype up and running as quickly as possible once they have something working, it would be devastating for the program to stop working soon afterwards so even thought the startup company will not be spending time testing until they finish a prototype it would be in their best interest to generate some automatic unit tests as soon as the prototype is working so that the current state can be captured and future regressions can be detected.Check this out: http://www.parasoft.com/jsp/technologies/unit_testing.jsp?it...
My C++ also tends to be simple.

I also have never had a need for any formal "design patterns", as every time I've encountered a problem for which it turns out there is named pattern in the books, a few moments thought about the problem has always led me to discover the solution myself.

Now, it could be that this means I'm some kind of programming genius. I wish that were true, but alas I think it is not so much a reflection of how good I am, but rather how mediocre many programmers are today.
Did you consider all factors, when you are so sure about it being the best tool for a job?

Few years ago, there were many people absolutely sure, that creating IE6-only webapps is also best decision. And look today, where that decision got them.
Where is he now?
It's far more complex than that. Are you talking about political spending by campaigns or by independent groups? By PACs or by corporations/unions? Within 60 days of an election (or 30 days of a primary) or not? Etc.
It's also completely decriminalized in Portugal, it worked well. California jails so many people on pot charges.
Better way of writing javascript (just like coffe script).

You can embed this in a web app and write your client-side code in python-syntax. Would work specially well if you server-side code is also in python.
> Marijuana is clearly a big piece of the puzzle, but what about legalizing harder drugs like cocaine?

All drugs should be legalized and regulated. Especially cocaine.

You will not have peace on this Earth until that happens. The drug cartels will simply move onto the next forbidden fruit. Prohibition is, as Paul and many others point out, an assault on basic human rights and freedoms, and it carries with it a tax on society. Not just in terms of dollars wasted but in lives ruined.

Education + Legalization.

Erowid and scientific fact in every classroom instead of propaganda and lies.

This is not exactly a difficult concept to grasp, and various parts of the world (like Portugal, Holland, etc.) are finally waking up to it, and their quality of life is improving because of it.

Unfortunately, years of lies, fear-mongering, brainwashing and propaganda can be hard to erase.
In 2001, Portugal decriminalized drugs. Data since then seems to indicate that the policy was successful.

rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.ht...

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/03/14...
A classic example are the companies that have sprung up for the sole purpose of maximizing Medicare payouts. Ever see those ads for scooters on TV "at no cost to you"?
Facebook acquires file-sharing service Drop.io
If they look at their logs, I bet they'll find that most people claim to have been born on the first day of January.
derwiki forgot to add that we need help wrangling our boatloads of data. We're hiring engineers:

http://www.yelp.com/careers
Primary source thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1849274
What can they do? There's gonna be a line somewhere. And most airports don't have room to make it straight instead of coiled.

Ultimately what we can't do is to entirely rejig our society to prevent people from being densely packed in any place at any time just in case somebody decides to set off a bomb. The best thing we can do is to keep suicide bombers fixated on hard targets like aeroplanes so they forget about soft targets like... well, whatever.
I haven't studied Prop 19 at all, but my guess is that its primary purpose is to get democrats to the polls. It's just like all the 'defense of marriage' propositions that were on the ballot when Bush was trying to get reelected to get republicans to the polls.

If so, that's quite a way for a libertarian to waste $100k.

edit: I love the open debate. Yeah, legalizing pot is definitely the most pressing problem facing our nation, so let's downvote anybody who says differently. HN is turning into Reddit.
Yeah, but what are you going to do if you're going overseas? Take a ship? :/
I might choose the backscatter machine with "F the TSA" written in aluminum foil under my shirt.
I had a Calc professor who also wrote the book we used. It was an early draft (not actually published, just printed out and bound) and we had to buy it. Unfortunately, his teaching method was impenetrable to most students and so was his book. So most everyone failed the course and got saved by the curve.
I'm sorry, but this thread is really just politics. I know Paul Buchheit's own submission of Paul Buchheit's article about why Paul Buchheit donated some money to a political cause has Buckley's chance of being deleted, but, y'know, it really is just political advocacy on a subject unrelated to anything other than politics. I hate to be a dick here, Paul, but, y'know.
There were some Microsoft technologies, that had better shelf life than other. NT, WinAPI, COM definitely belong there.
Yes. Very clever. Where else could a terrorist find a crowd?
> It appears to provide the wrong incentives.

Right. Change the incentives so they get money if the prisoners are healthy on discharge, and also so that they get money for non-recividism (e.g. each prisoner not rearrested gives the prison some bonus).
I like one of the comments over there:

>Wrong on so many levels. Primarily the assumption that real men shoot third world peasants in the face for pay.
I had read various interviews over the years, and was stuck by how thoughtful they tended to be, on matters of writing and craft in general. Having them now online is real treasure, and just struck me as the sort of thing HN'ers would appreciate.
This isn't the kind of freedom I served my country for.

If this article is true, it's a highly-disturbing downfall for American civil liberties.
From the article: Unfortunately for globe trotters, the first version of the phone likely won't be built to work outside the U.S. -- it probably won't carry a special chip that can turn it into a "world phone." However, it may have some of the features on the iPad distributed in Verizon's stores, like live TV for customers of the FiOS cable service.

This is what I've been hearing from the rumors anyways, so no big surprise. The interesting thing to watch for will be whether the next gen (iPhone 5th generation) for Verizon will use CDMA + GSM for international, or if Verizon will have a 4G network up in time to make it unnecessary.
> 2. Upon entering security, strip completely naked.

It would be amazing to get a campaign going of people doing this.
I'm doing a startup at the moment and we have a 3 month old. My wife is a surgery resident, so she works long hours and is not able to help out very much. I think the only reason we are able to do this is that we have my mother in law staying with us, and I work from home. It can be very hard at times to balance the schedule even with her helping. I get quite a lot of code done late at night when the baby is asleep, but the focused uninterrupted coding time that I used to be able to do just doesn't happen as often.
The Iraq War Diary - An Initial Grep
Class Action Suits Target Google, Facebook, Zynga
As a consumer, why would you inject yourself with an untested drug from some unknown startup?
I think the length of runway required to get a 747 off the ground would make this prohibitive (as if the cost of an aircraft carrier didn't already). Nimitz class carriers are just over 1,000 ft in length. A quick Google search reveals that a 747 needs about 6x that for safe takeoff/landing.
The C API also has a learning curve, and is certainly harder than cython. You don't need a couple of weeks to learn cython - I rewrote one small package from ctypes to cython in ~ 1 day, without previous experience in cython.

The problem of C python extensions is that it is so hard to write correctly because of reference counting.
In quantity only, not quality. If someone orders you to do something you consider immoral and you still do it, you're just as much to blame.

See the Milgram experiment and the Nuremberg trials. The "just doing their job" excuse isn't good enough for passengers or for employees, they should do the right thing and quit/disobey.
They're available, but not finished. I've posted the first four courses, which should be more than enough to get started. The next two courses are written, and I'm (hopefully) going to have the in good shape to post next week.
That's too bad, I always recommended the service for easy collaboration and sharing, was one of my favourites.

But well, Facebook will hopefully make good use of the technology and the many channels drop.io had already incorporated to extend it's group collaboration options.
Dallas Startup Weekend 3 Is Coming
seems like just a talent acquisition to me
In parts of the US, we give out clean needles to addicts. We treat heroin addiction with opiates. This is very important. However, I think that many people these days underestimate how harmful heroin is per se.

I'd really rather deal with the marijuana issue as separate from the heroin issue.
Out of curiosity, how many bombs in suitcases did we get back when people could do that?
Either that or getting someone to read his articles.
> the latest three rounds of security increases

But there haven't been security increases! They are just targeting one of an infinite number of threats, making their coverage with each of these specific measures effectively zero. Remember: the 9/11 hijackers didn't need bombs.
>the information was available before and yes there are malicious uses for it, but making it easier to access isn't the issue.

FireSheep inside Facebook?
"As of this week, people will no longer be able to create new free drops"

Fuck. I loved this service because it was so easy to send people large files. Anyone know of a replacement? Yes, I have a Dropbox account.
International waters start 12 miles from shore, so I'm pretty sure (but not positive) there would be no jurisdiction there.

One of many problems is that a lot of places are not near an ocean, so that rules out an aircraft carrier :)
If you've seen firsthand what a drug like meth does to a person, it makes you think twice about the ideal that everyone has the right to put whatever they want into their body/mind. The fact is, not everyone has the good judgment to make responsible use of that freedom, and some drugs really are much nastier than others, causing deep harm to both the user and society.

At the same time, we would be deluding ourselves to think that locking people up changes anything, whether we go after the supply or the demand.

The best way to move towards a sensible drug policy is to start by admitting that there are no good solutions, and that the best we can hope to do is to minimize harm, both from the drugs themselves, and the cartels.

(I agree, though, regarding drug education: Erowid has the capability to save far more lives than DARE ever could.)
Obviously not for their ability to build scalable blogging services (dropio blog site currently down) ;)
Yeah, turns out the cost is also more than an order of magnitude- an aircraft carrier is somewhere in the high single digit billions of dollars, where as your jumbo jet is in the hundreds of millions....
Foldit: Solve Puzzles for Science
So, I hold a non-immigrant visa and I've made a personal decision not to actively electioneer or participate in anything electoral in the US or California.

Most people agree it was disgusting and inappropriate for people based in other states to phone-bank Californian voters over Prop 8, and the same logic kind of applies to me given that I'm non-immigrant (but living here for 4.5 years).

I also don't like it when non-citizens get involved with politics and elections in my home of UK and so I have to abide by that when the boot is on the other foot.
The harmful effects of prohibition exist irrespective of the drug. History has shown that they are largely of the same character (but perhaps different in scale) for cocaine, heroin, alcohol, etc.

You take a substance out of the hands of professionals and place it into the hands of criminals. The quality of the substance goes down. The number of dead bodies goes up. The truth about the drugs themselves gets completely distorted with lies and propaganda instead of becoming common knowledge.

Legalization should go hand-in-hand with education and healthcare reform. If you get those elements right, you'll have a much more functioning society. Fewer drunk drivers, fewer overdoses, and no drug cartels to speak of.
It's okay to believe in something.
stolen from slashdot, which stole it from the comments in tfa:

Translated from this page: http://adacemobility.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/das-wunder-von... [wordpress.com]
"Technical Data Audi A2 DBM *
* Subject
Empty weight (including driver) 1260 kg
Perm. Total weight 1600 kg
Battery lithium-iron-polymer (260 Ah/380 V) cell voltage of 3.8 volts
Battery weight about 300 kg
Charging time about 4 hours due to mains phase current in the household (380)
battery requires 6 minutes (future solution)
Life time 2500 charge cycles (without loss of capacity)
= Service life target: 500,000 km
Top speed 160 km / h
5-speed sequential gearbox (race gear: shifting without the clutch)
E-motor 300 Nm torque"
So, the 6 minute charge is future/theoretical limits of the battery. The actual time is 4 hours; which is still very impressive.
Sincerely, Neil
strongly recommend not stopping with clojure. Find other languages outside your comfort zone, that require you to learn about different technologies and different ways of thinking.

You should know at least one language with a strong type system that's closely modelled on the hardware environment. (eg C or Java)

Databases and SQL.

OS-level tracing/debugging languages like Dtrace or SystemTap.

Puppet/system administration

Javascript/Browsers

Mobile/? (I don't know much about phones)

An ML-style language.
See, I actually think it is better than a "regular" job. Have a 4 month old and recently launched http://www.callmejobs.com. Gives me more freedom, though stress is always there.
Green Button is a startup already doing this:
http://www.greenbutton.net/

They even use Azure. They don't specifically support Renderman, though. (At least, not yet.)

Like other posters here, I would be curious to know why these companies are using Azure instead of some other cloud platform.
you really can't see the potential start-up opportunities that will come forth through the legalization of a substance that millions of people use worldwide?

well at least i know you won't be my competition. keep on keeping on man.
Yes; however, Verizon has been testing Voice over Revision A, which would route voice packets over the data channel and thus allow both voice and regular data packets to coexist. According to various articles from a few months ago, the roll-out will be in 1Q2011.
Zuckerberg has said that all of the acquisitions FB has made are essentially for the talent, not the product.
Some of the suits are likely joined with class actions already in progress.

Facebook's situation now is very reminiscent of Microsoft's situation in the 1999-2001ish time frame. Very few of the class action lawsuits got traction, but the ones that did went on for a long time. The antitrust cases were settled at the federal and state levels, but there were some harrowing times with testimony in Congress that made MS look really bad and surprisingly incompetent. Much to everybody's surprise the Bush FTC wound up taking action against Hotmail on EPIC's complaint.

The FTC is hard to calibrate these days but Facebook probably faces more international opposition than Microsoft did. At the state level, a lot depends on what happens in California (which is probably part of the reason FB and Google are giving to the Reupblican AG candidate). It'll be interesting ...
Facebook only does talent acquisitions.

Though, I always wondered why drop.io got any attention. Upload thing. Get URL. Share URL? Optional paywall behind URL. Did they have other features?
I found this to be very interesting but at the same time nearly impossible to read. It might have something to do with the average number of commas per sentence being around 5.
Ishqballe - Free Matrimony
The key is to address it as a problem for mental health professionals rather than a problem for the criminal justice system.
IE9's javascript engine uses multiple cores for impressive performance
Why startup dad is kicking your ass.
I would love to stand up to it, but I'd really just rather get to my vacation place. If it didn't cost several hundred dollars for a plane ticket to get to that point, I would just drive down to the airport and do it. I guess we could all print fake boarding passes, though.
It's sad that founders do this kind of thing to their users. Why not sell the company to Facebook (with attendant personnel agreements), but sell the assets (users, technical infrastructure) to a competitor at a steep discount, maybe in exchange for shares?

That way their users have a fighting chance at a smooth transition, and the technical contribution you made can continue.
The laws of the state you're in affect you directly. I personally think it's entirely fair game. The logic for people out of the state doing so appears different enough for me to distinguish.

> I also don't like it when non-citizens get involved with politics and elections in my home of UK and so I have to abide by that when the boot is on the other foot.

Then why are you even commenting here? There is no bright line between discussing likely consequences here and more general advocacy.
http://blog.tsa.gov/2009/03/can-i-take-photos-at-checkpoint-...
"pile of crap" and "fundamentally unscalable" and I'm the religious one o_0
Why is Dropbox insufficient? Are you sending them files that are >2GB?

When I want to send people large files, if I know they have a Dropbox account, I use a Dropbox shared folder.

Else, I choose one of:

* Use it as an excuse to get them to sign up for Dropbox and get me referral credit.

* Stick it in my Dropbox Public folder and send them the link.

* Upload it to my VPS and send them the link.

None of those are that hard, especially #2.