skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 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.

I have, and not just for meth, but for heroin, and alcohol, and nicotine, and caffeine, and all sorts of other drugs.

Have you seen first hand what it looks like when somebody takes a women and fucks her in front of her husband, then tortures her, and finally cuts her head off?

What about a man being thrown alive into an acid bath?

No? Would you like to see that? Can you imagine what it would be like to be in their shoes? Just head South of the border. Ask for the Zetas. Ask for the families of people who have been kidnapped and turned into slaves.

This is the _reality_ of drug prohibition. Entire neighborhoods living in constant fear.

Methamphetamine can cause some damage to the human body when abused. So can water. The difference between a hit of meth in your hand and a punk standing over your head with a rifle pointed at your temple should be obvious. The difference between a hit of meth in your pipe and the unrelenting human suffering that goes on in America's overflowing prisons should be obvious. It is the difference between personal choice and the consequences thereof, versus violence imposed upon you by another, completely out of your control. It is the difference between freedom and prohibition.

I could kill myself by overdosing on a number of substances right at this moment, but I don't. It's because I know better, not because there's a law against it. It is far easier, cheaper and more humane to educate a population and provide them with the healthcare and counseling that they need than it is to deal with the horrors that are going on around you today due to prohibition.

Compassion and understanding and freedom will lead to a better world.

Prisons and prohibition perpetuate suffering.
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If you could walk into the drugstore and buy mushrooms, marijuana, 2CB, 2CI, LSD, DMT, adderol, MDMA, heroin and cocaine, how many people do you think would still be playing around with meth?
What is the definition of a "dangerous" drug? If it's addiction you are talking about, I would be willing to bet that most people who try drugs, even the supposedly highly addictive ones, probably do not become the hopeless addicts that people like to point to when talking about the dangers of drugs. My guess is that people try them for a while or off and on on a recreational basis and it would be a rather minor part of their life.
Some more Carmack tweets on C++

IMO, good C++ code is better than good C code, but bad C++ can be much, much worse than bad C code.
10:17 AM Oct 6th

I wish C++ had a "functional" qualifier to enforce no global references or side effects.
11:16 PM Sep 21st

Reading More Effective C++. I have grown to appreciate at least some uses of most C++ features, but I still don't buy in on exceptions.
10:26 PM Aug 13th
Kids these days with their allocations and virtual memory. shakes fist

You don't need std::vector if you don't need dynamic memory allocations. Game programming and systems programming is a whole lot different than web or desktop development.

For games, you create a memory budget up front. You decide how much memory sound, textures, models, AI will consume up front and then statically allocate that memory up front.
http://gamesfromwithin.com/start-pre-allocating-and-stop-wor...

You can statically allocate at the start of a game, level, and frame.

From the original article: OpenAL appears to have a limit of 1024 sound buffers, which we bumped into. We could dynamically create and destroy the static buffer mappings without too much trouble, but that is a reasonable number for us to stay under.

It also sounds like Carmack is loading an entire level as a memory mapped file and then doing reads into specific indexes within the file.

Take a look at the source code that id has open sourced. That's the best way to get a feel how this style of development works. I believe RtCW is their last release.
ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/source/
http://github.com/monoid/rtcw-rebirth
But then don't you have a lot of CPUs going unused, because you are partitioning your resources?

Is it really difficult to automatically allocate shared resources?
I saw that quote at New Wark and Cincinnati.
For #4, depending on who is doing the pat down, you might not have to pretend to enjoy it.
Facebook still has MySQL doing a bunch of grunt work, but they're basically treating it like a NoSQL store - sharded key-value storage and that's it. They're moving to HBase now.

And, yeah, damn right I'm hesitant about a single piece of hardware that costs $200k and still leaves you with a SPOF. Effectively you're saying it's a 400k piece of hardware after replication. Oh, and Oracle replication software costs you an extra several hundred thousand. So for about a million dollars, yeah, unless it's incredibly transactional in nature, I'd give other options a very serious look.
Facebook's recent talent acquisitions sort of make sense to me from Facebook's standpoint (good, entrepreneurial talent is hard to find), but I wonder how the founders, employees, users, and investors feel about these relatively odd buyouts.

This drop.io deal sounds a lot like the Hot Potato acquisition from a few months ago: in both cases the startups were well-funded, but didn't have much traction, and then Facebook paid 8 figures to essentially buy the main founder (Sam Lessin at drop.io, Justin Schaffer at Hot Potato), and essentially let everything else die (the sites were shut down, the technology scrapped, other employees weren't hired by facebook, etc.)

A few questions for HN:

- Is Facebook paying too much for these founders? (They're basically shelling out a $10 MM signing bonus that lets these entrepreneurs placate their investors, and then come to Facebook. (Accept the founders only get a fraction of the money, obviously). Is it worth it? What are other new Facebook executives paid in signing bonuses?)

- What do the investors think about this? (Are the investors in Hot Potato and Drop.io happy to get a modest return instead of nothing (because these companies hadn't taken off yet), or are they frustrated that these companies ended somewhat abruptly?)

- How do the employees feel? (Does it feel like success for them when the whole point of the acquisition is really just to buy their boss? Obviously they get money for their equity, so maybe that trumps any other feelings.) [Full disclosure: I actually work with one of the co-founders of Hot Potato (who didn't go to Facebook), so I know his opinions on this issue, but I'm still curious to hear others' thoughts].

- How do users feel? (Are these buyouts fair to them?)

- And lastly, Isn't there a slight paradox with the fact that these founders are being plucked at such high premiums because they're brilliant leaders, and yet, in both the cases of Hot Potato and Drop.io, these startups weren't runaway successes? In other words, doesn't the lack of clear success of these startups undermine the basic premise that the founders deserve $10 MM "signing bonuses"?
A nice interface. Making it extremely easy to do something simple (but something that the average person can't do without some kind of service) is often all you need.

Don't complain about others' successes. Learn from this that a nice interface for something simple is often enough, and go find a market where you can do the same thing, and get rich :)

(Note that I've used it to a very limited extent. But even if they have other features, my understanding was that the main value proposition was its simple, pleasant interface.)
Talk me through this. As I understood it, and I must be wrong here, a decimal type is an abstraction around an infinite-precision integer, which represents something like thousandths of a cent? I thought there was an IEEE standard, and it was the standard for all financial transactions. Is this not what BigDecimal is?
Batteries have a current limit that is defined based upon the capacity of the battery. Typical low-cost lithium iron phosphate batteries (which is the chemistry looks like they are using here) usually claim a top current limit of 10C, which would allow a full charge in just over 6 minutes. Really great lithium phosphate batteries can give you a current limit of 30C or higher, which basically means your charging times are limited by how large you want your battery wires to be. This is true for most electric cars.

The only reason a Tesla Roadster can't charge in 2 minutes is because Tesla didn't want to / couldn't engineer a low cost solution that dealt with customers buying two packs (one for the garage, one for the car), which were connected by a wire doing thousands of amps at many hundreds of volts. That kind of connection can be literally explosive, much less potentially fatal to creatures that use electricity to regulate their internal fluid pumps. It's all about how fast you can shove electrons down a wire, and very little to do with the batteries themselves for this kind of pack. Rewiring a pack in parallel to put out / accept that kind of current is trivial.
They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

Martin Niemöller
How about we just give up on the whole farce altogether? The TSA isn't making airplanes any safer from bombers, period.

Think about it: If they'd had a single success, just one instance where they stopped someone from doing something bad, they'd be screaming it from the rooftops every chance they got. Since they're not, and we haven't heard of anything more malicious than grandmothers with nailclippers, I think its safe to say that the TSA hasn't done a damn thing.
Senators are Congressmen. Did you mean your representatives?
It is true that some amount of personal pressure will get you to be more productive. But, err too far on the side of too much and you burn out. So, while I can see why startup dad may be able to outperform a founder in a more relaxed position, it is not necessarily true that those conditions are good.

A little pressure is good. Too much pressure is bad. It is a fine line between the two.
Google gives a good take on restrained C++:
http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.x...
We're allocating EMR clusters as needed. When they're no longer needed, they go away. Waste is minimal.
A replacement for Drop.io is already in the works, I imagine. (And Dropbox won't cut it for a lot of people; it's not as straightforward to do a simple fileshare, and there are other cool features [e.g. RSS] that Dropbox doesn't do.)
Nice to see one more production use of Cython.
At Microsoft we were scaling SQL Server up to 10-100k rows per second on OLTP $20k systems with a hot cache and RAIDed HDDs.

In one of the code-word projects I saw an $25k system with an OLTP dataset do 1 billion rows in a second.

Edit: We also had statistics that said that 90% of our customers had less than 100GB of data. 99% had < 1 TB. The vast majority of database users shouldn't even be thinking about looking at non-RDBMS systems.
This is a very good point. Some University professors get into it for research, some for teaching, not many for both. The problem is that Universities will typically cater to one type of professor, leaving the others scrambling to spend a lot of time doing the thing that they don't like (and which takes a lot of their time).

Also, Teaching Assistants really should be offered more in every level of education. A good TA can reduce the instructor's load significantly, while at the same time offering much better interaction ratios with students with questions.
now they're reduced to sticking dynamite up their butts.

If a guy is willing to blow up the plane he is flying on, do you really believe that living with a stick of dynamite shoved up his ass for his final 5 hours is going to be a deterrent?

This is exactly what security theater refers to: security procedures that do not have internal consistency and hence, are nothing but show.
Maybe some should copy their business plan and enter that market niche they occupied (assuming their plan has been successful so far).
Using a non-blocking server with Python does make sense if you use non-blocking code for the things that take a long time. Here's an example: a server takes 400ms to handle a request. Of that time, 300ms is spent waiting for an HTTP response to an external service. The other 100ms is spent accessing the local database and other blocking operations. If the server does not block waiting for the HTTP response, then an instance of the server can handle 10 requests a second (1000ms / (400ms - 300ms)). If the server does block, then an instance of the server can handle 2.5 requests per second (1000ms / 400ms). An instance of the non-blocking server has 4x the throughput of the blocking server.
I upvoted you and agree. However, there is also that the shutdown may be driven by facebook for a variety of reasons. As a founder, it is probably really hard to walk away from an offer that is very attractive personally but bad for the service.

On the other hand, starting with that mentality is probably bad. c.f. pg's "do something you think is good for the world"
Today all of my SMS messages disappeared off my HTC Incredible.

Google is just full of wonderful surprises.
It's most certainly misleading.
I doubt the investors are unhappy with an exit, employees and users on the other hand are probably disappointed (though I hope the employees saw something of the exit which probably alleviates disappointment).
>All done with stored procs

>The limits of the RDBMS are orders of magnitude greater than the NoSQL crowd think they are.

Wish I had more upvotes. Knowing what logic to put in stored procs, and what to put in the application code, so as to play to the strengths of the db and the strengths of the appserver, seems to be a lost art these days.
Hmm. I don't think that pressure is that bad, it really depends on how you handle it. For instance, look at UStream guys. Brad is a startup dad, from the navy/army. During service he was probably put under much more pressure and back then he was still a dad...so it really boils down to how well you handle the pressure coming at you.

Burnouts? Definitely. I don't handle pressure that well, so I have so many of them! :(
They killed off MyRail Lite ages ago as well: http://www.bluesnapper.com/blog/stuff/kizoom-myrail-lite-gon...
All of the startup founders that I know are internally driven and do not depend on the environment and/or circumstances to motivate them.

Just because I have more time than you does not mean that you use your time more efficiently than i do. I have 12 hours a day to code and thats just what I do. I dont sit around for 9 and code for 3 just because I have time to. I code for 12 because I want to. I can also fly across the country on a moments notice and stay up all night for a client if needed.

Can startup dad?

My point is that IMHO nothing that limits your flexibility and distracts you can possibly give you an advantage as a startup founder.
the coiled, closely packed lines at TSA screening sites are the most dangerous places in airports, completely unprotected from a terrorist attack -- a terrorist attack that would serve the same purpose (shutting down air travel) as an attack on board an aircraft.

I don't think this is true. The purpose of terrorism is to spread fear, the killing is only a byproduct. The reason hijackings and bombs on planes are so effective is that many people already fear planetrips. You're caught in a tin can that intuitively should drop to the ground instead of flying through the air ten kilometers above the ground with no way of getting out. The thought of a crazy guy with a bomb in his pants just waiting to detonate it makes the experience absolutely terrifying to a lot of people. They'll think about it every time the get on a plane even though the chance of dying in a terrorist attack is close to zero.
Colombia is indeed pretty cool. Let me know if you decide to visit argentina. skype: andreshbarreto
Now I know why is.gd feels so fast; it is...for Europe.
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I'm sorry you didn't like my post, but I think you sort-of missed my point. It's not that an incompetent teacher is no barrier to learning (because learning is definitely enhanced by a good teacher), it's that students have choices in what and how they consume education. If you don't like the way you are being taught, then find a better source for what you want to learn.

In particular, there are people who have taken your class before. The teacher is the primary person who has ostensibly taken that class before, but when that fails, there are students who have taken that class before. Find the few who got As, and ask for help. Or if the book is awful, ask around for a better book. Or hell, MIT's got their OpenCourseWare for more and more topics every year. As students (really, we all are), it has never been easier to learn.
For kicks, a little while ago, I refused one of these machines (you can't really cause a "ruckus" too often when flying for work).

The guy just shrugged, gave me a quick pat down and let me through. I'd say about 30% of the people took the same option and received the same treatment. Same every time since I've that I've been through.

But the last time one guy made a big deal of how invasive the machine was (not rude, just loud about his refusal) and got the works (well, a rough pat down and then taken to one side). Obviously, this is a different case, he was just joking around with them. But I imagine this could easily have been a different story if one of the TSA officers couldn't handle a bit of humour (all too common, sadly).

Just saying.

These machines are a real problem for our privacy/society. But all the "horror" stories (not so much this one) we are seeing are mostly the result of people making a fuss, and getting rough treatment.

We should just refuse these, politely and quietly, and at such a volume all they can do is what they have done previously; give us a pat down.

Fortunately it looks like the UK air services are "rebelling" somewhat against "draconian security measures". It's not 100% certain what they are talking about, but I got the impression this covered resisting the spread of these machines in the UK.

Which makes a change :)
It's somewhat dated now, but yousendit.com is still around.
But that's the point, it's not clever. It's blindingly obvious, virtually impossible to stop, and it hasn't happened. So terrorists are either incredibly stupid or extremely rare. Either case suggests that we are spending way too much in both money and freedom defending against the alleged threat.
Email? Possibly. Chat? Dunno, but not very confident it would be held up. IANAL either.
Yes. I'm not a startup dad and I get where you're going at. Internal driven is a large portion of what motivates people. I'll take myself for example, before I even knew what a startup was I was building parsers and what not. I needed money really bad so I started looking into consulting which then lead to startups, etc.. Entrepreneurs are internally driven because a lot of them have been through a lot of bad environments and want to create a better life and fuel the economy(which is related to the first point)
Won't anyone think of the poor Canadians in the Kootenays? http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/10/27/b...
This never made sense to me. These rumors claim that a Verizon iPhone will be released in early 2011. However, the iPhone's release cycle indicates that the next hardware update's due in June.
New hardware would be necessary for a Verizon iPhone (so it could work with CDMA), but if they were releasing new hardware, they'd likely have to fix the antenna issues.
If they did that, they'd then have two different hardware models on release cycles phase shifted by a few months from each other, and would have different hardware for different carriers--a sort of fragmentation that would massively complicate purchase of iPhones from Apple Stores. I just can't see Apple releasing a Verizon iPhone before June, or even releasing two separate pieces of hardware. It seems far more likely to me that they'd integrate CDMA and GSM into one phone, to avoid fragmentation and complication of the user experience.
Talk about Old Skool British behaviour. I grew up with this mentality and have been merrily waving it goodbye for the past couple of decades.

As well as the suggestions in the article's comments, I'd drop a tweet to Glynn Moody (@glynmoody) who will certainly take this on. Also worthwhile tweeting would be Tim Danton (@timdanton) editor of PCPro (for USians, that's the UK's main commercial tech mag), and also Tom Watson (@tom_watson) our "Uber Geek in Parliament".

No harm in getting a petition going at Number10 and maybe asking the Open Rights Group (@OpenRightsGroup) to get involved and start a campaign of lobbying MPs.

In addition, open data is huge in the Euro Parliament, so write to all you MEPs via http://www.writetothem.com/

Don't ignore the latter, my experience with my MEPs has been excellent. One even sends a weekly newsletter giving his diary, what occurred, and what he's up to next. Once you engage with these folk, things really can start happening.

We need to fight to keep public data available, and there's loads of support in the places where it matters, so just start making some noise and you'll soon have your app back working, and hopefully you additional app too.
I'm a little amused that the release of a Diaspora alpha demo rocketed up on HN in a matter of minutes, while Appleseed, which has been cast as one of many superior alternatives to Diaspora, is languishing after nine hours.
So mock their API with BeautifulSoup or Hpricot :-)
Ordinary aircraft aren't compatible with carriers--you need a tailhook to land, at the very least. You need significantly more talented pilots to land on carriers. You need billions of dollars in aircraft carriers. (The most extravagant navy in the world has about 12. How many carriers do you need to make an airline out of it?) The shock of catapult-assisted takeoff is not for everyone; the passengers would need to be in decent health. Add all of this to the fact that airlines are only marginally profitable in the first place, and it's just completely infeasible.