skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cities sprinter should be lighter ("just" 100 tons), it's directly derived from the Siemens Eurosprinter line, which are 4-axle locomotives, and in Europe, locomotive heavier than 22.5 or so tons per axle would be almost useless. Even that is very heavy (ES engines weight about 85 tons), and a typical European EMU (locomotives are fading out of the favor in Europe, for anything else than freight, and rightly so) are even lighter (50 to 60 tons per carriage). Anyway, cities sprinter is heavier because of an additional armor required by the US regulations and it needs a lot of power (it has output of 6.4 megawatts, imagine that). Perhaps you could make a battery car to (very slowly and so-so) finish the trip from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh. But you really can't expect that it'd be viable to equip a main line electric locomotive with batteries. And making it even heavier is a bad choice too, as that would (especially at higher speeds, above 160 km/h, and this engine is perfectly capable of 200 km/h trips, common in Europe) put an immense wear on the infrastructure (everywhere the locomotive is used), making it, in the long run, cheaper to just electrify the line (which is what should be done).
Is this directly due to them being featured on MSDN?
YES!

Seriously, most people won't get to the point where you with their 'start-ups', so you seem to have a live one. If you ever wondered about stopping before this is the worst time to decide to do so, just another 6 months and you'll know what you've got.

Keep at it and make a go of it, you're very close to launch, why on earth would you give up at this stage. All the sunk costs you've already had, now is the time to push on and make a go of it.
Twitter by the Petabyte: Using Big Data to Define Market Sentiment
> What if exploring the boundaries of your capability, your talents, was its own reward?

Then you're gaining something (discovery of new assets, freedom, happiness, sense of accomplishment, self-actualization, etc.) and seeking to maximize gains. Risk does not magically become utility. If gains are held constant, nearly everyone chooses the one with less risk because it has a higher expected value. Entrepreneurs are gain maximizers. Risk is only _ utility _ in the case of masochism.
You could make it fit your worldview by:

- defining anyone who likes adventure as "not sane" in your book

- including "risk of regret over having had an unadventurous life" into your risk calculation

- just run an analogy with casinos, where the gamblers are purchasing 'fun'

Or you could explore the idea that rational choice theory isn't a set of fundamental axioms of human behavior but a (mostly successful) attempt at a descriptive theory.
They're not that silly actually.

Division is the most 'complicated' of the arithmetic operations and if you rely on doing sums in your head frequently then knowing such shortcuts can speed up the calculations considerably.

It also helps in checking results of other calculations.
http://github.com/downloads/tav/ampify/distfile.openssl-0.9....

^ Patched version of OpenSSL for the various optimisations...
You make me think of a way for every user to make their own members only club, by filtering, and they 100% control who is visible in it; others can view through another's filter:

1. every user can config a "whitelist" of users, to personalize HN to only show comments from those users (and access other users via parent links). This is the "filter", of who they "follow".

2. you can set your whitelist to be the whitelist of any other users. This is "subscribing".

Some few users would end up working to maintain detailed whitelists (like, who they "follow"), and most others would just "subscribe" to them. New users would be left out in the cold til one of these services picked them up (like new bands getting signed to music labels?)

No way would pg go for this, but it's interesting to me. It's sort of a variation of subreddits; and a bit like the various newswire services (like reuters etc) being picked up by local newspapers...
[this is a repeat of my post on his blog]

From what I've read, the devices were wired to detonate via cell phone, and some speculated that the devices were to be triggered when the flights were over major cities. This raises three questions in my mind:

1. Did the flight paths of these planes actually go over major cities? Or just on the periphery?

2. Will cell phone signals reach flight altitude?

3. (Although Bruce advocates doing nothing) Would cell phone signal jammers on cargo planes be a cheap deterrent in this case?
I don't have any bluray and don't miss about them. Apple has iTunes which could be considered as competitor to bluray distribution.

But there is no substitution to USB3 or TRIM now.
In a way I understand what you're saying, but I feel our environment influences how we interact with each other-- anywhere. For example, rules can be added to give structure to a debate. The whole debate format, while artificial, exists to increase the utility of 'real life' discussion.

It seems to me anything we can do to boost the interesting aspects of this community are fair game, and they augment real life itself.
Articles like this make it seem that HTML5 aims to solve similar problems as Flash. It is less clear that it is a better solution. The primary argument against Flash is that in performs poorly, and the primary counter-argument is that Flash developers are writing inefficient code. How will HTML5 stop that from happening?
If you had meant "commercial" in the sense of recommending non-free software, you'd be correct in some sense. However, as I said, Fedora contains non-free firmware, like Ubuntu. So, in that sense, Fedora is the same category as Ubuntu, but is different in its repository policies.

Of course, you have said that you meant commercial in that they're trying to make money off of it. Thanks for clarifying!
A fun read, but basically another "entrepreneurs are superheroes" article.

It seems unlikely that anyone would get utility out of risk itself, independently of the reward. But many people, given the choice of two scenarios with equal risk/reward ratios, tend to choose the scenario with the higher risk numerator. "Bet big or go home".
Ideally, yes. I don't have any projects meriting this function but I could foresee it in the future; in the meantime I wanted to know what HN thought. I'm glad to see some interested in such a site function.
Alexa has had them in the top 500 for a while:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stackoverflow.com

That's very impressive, I think that stackoverflow will see a major boost from google groups shutting down too.
It seems that they have stable growth and there is no big increase in traffic last time. So it looks unrelated.
> I'd like to see the karma system dispensed with entirely

Totally agree with that. Comments should be judged on their merits, not the number of points they have gained or lost. Disagreement should be expressed using actual words rather than "thumbs up" or "thumbs down". Removing comment karma would slow people down as they scan comments: rather than just looking for the highest-rated ones, they would have to look at the meaning of all of them. Bitch-slapping commenters with a down-vote doesn't add anything to community or discussion. Clicking the "me too!" upvote button doesn't help that much either.

Keep a flag for "spam", "inappropriate" or "offensive" and leave it at that. People who habitually misuse those buttons should lose the ability to use them at all. People who are constantly (and justifiably) reported using them should have their account limited in some way, maybe limiting the frequency or number of comments they can make.

(I mean comment karma, specifically, not submission karma.)
Totally disagree, lots of people get utility out of the risk itself, and this is the main theme of the article.
Intel opens Vietnamese chip shop
Agreed. there's a perrfect example of this in recent nosql debates - a few abusive comments are sitting at plus 17 because people agree with whats being said, but the tone is very, very nasty towards anyone being disagreed with (which includes myself amongst others).
I'd like to register my strong disagreement with this notion.

While accountability has many benefits, I believe our world doesn't allow any feasible way to discuss many important topics without anonymity— especially in regard to business or our jobs. Think of the trouble that can come from discussing salaries, and don't even bother going into what sort of trouble opinions on drug policy can bring people.

While real name accountability can bring a lot of gravity to a discussion, I feel our current social order will give certain people unwarranted power under their real name while forcing others to censor themselves entirely.
Google Group isn't shutting down. They're turning off files and pages, that's all.
Why not just tell them if there is something specific, but failing that just repeat what you just said: you want to focus on keeping the catalogue small, which means that some applications that are otherwise appropriate will be omitted. Invite them to email you back if and when they release and update to their project and promise to reassess it at that time.
Tokyo Metropolitan police documents may have been leaked on internet
If everyone is complaining about a different part of your software, that probably means just nitpicking. If the complaints converge on a feature or two, then you should absolutely listen to what they have to say. King is right on the money on this one.
I guess that settles the debate about whether choice of language matters or not :)

Although I can't imagine scaling has been fun (or cheap).
The recent NoSQL discussion. There's a user called gaius who spent a lot of time abusing anyone who mentioned why they used a nosql database.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1847978
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1847783 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1847836

everything is a sarcastic take on the parent, a comparison without any justification, or a straight out insult ie 'it makes me laugh'. The parents one of whom is me are all making polite comments about why we use nosql in our projects, and paraphrased sarcastic insults are sitting there upmodded. Who seem to agree with the sentiment but don't care about the tone, civility or lack of supporting arguments.
LM is a particularly poor algorithm for passwords. There's a fair bit of info here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Reverse_Engineering/Cracking_Wi...

It's disabled by default on Vista and 7 (AFAIK, it was on my Windows 7 build, and I don't think that was me) but is enabled by default on Windows XP. You can find out how to disable it here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299656
> Ah! you say - but the "minimizing risk" here isn't actually minimizing risk, but increasing another risk, a risk that you'll never get anywhere in life, won't raise a family and pass on your genes, etc.

This is a useful insight, that minimising risk at one level can mean maximising it at another.
It isn't for Erlang. If you look at the history of Erlang the language was released and after it had been in use for a while the language design team went around, identified the design patterns in use and implemented them as behaviours - the OTP system.

Where design patterns go wrong is in being a description of how to build a wheel (so you don't have to redsign the wheel) - what you really want is a wheel (so you don't have to rebuild the wheel).
Why Your Financial Adviser Is Scared to Set You Straight
Well, TRIM seems to be pretty redundant these days. The latest generation of SSDs (Intel, Sandforce) work just fine even without TRIM due to intelligent block management and aggressive garbage collection.

As for Blu-Ray, I don't really see them taking off just yet and honestly don't see a point in preferring them over digital distribution. AND, I would gladly dispense with optical drives altogether if I could get a smaller, lighter laptop instead.

Remember how Steve Jobs said that they would never build a netbook--and now there is the 11" Air.
Don't you get it? Anonymous and non-anonymous comments have equal ranking. The point of my system is just to encourage most people to be non-anonymous. This means that the vast majority of comments will stay civil, and when most comments are civil, the tone will tend to stay that way. If you need to make commentary on drug policy or your salary, then simply make an anonymous account and say all you want to say. There is no penalty to that.
I've never looked at quantcast stats before. How accurate are their estimates of age, income, kids? I ask because it says that 23% of Stack Overflow's visitors are female, and that doesn't seem very accurate. NB: This is based solely on my recollection posters' avatars, which may be a bad measure, but it's the only one I've got.
You can add USB3 to MacBooks with PCI-E expansion -- the older 15" MBPs, all 17" MBPs, all Mac Pros.

Since Intel has decided not to support USB3 until 2012 it's obvious they are going to push a USB3 alternative soon which will win because Intel dominates the PC chipset market. Apple is probably fully aware of this and doesn't see any reason to support USB3.
I think you're missing my point. There are first order effects and second order effects. Animals (including people) don't usually understand second order effects very well; so we have evolved mechanisms to encourage us towards desirable second-order effects, even when the first order effects may be negative.

I'm pointing to the rewards of manageable risk as a mechanism - probably an evolutionary mechanism - for exploring boundaries and thereby gaining things, even if you didn't know they existed.

It's all very well to talk about the rewards of new assets, freedom etc., but the reward from a risky venture isn't necessarily obvious; it may even be utterly unknown in the history of human kind. But if the risk itself being rewarding is a mechanism, it may encourage the discovery of such rewards.

The key misunderstanding problem here is the overloading of language. We have this talk of rationality, of evolutionary psychology, of emotions and drives. The key thing to understand, though, is that all may simply be different ways talking about the same things.

I'm saying that both things can be true: that it's rational consideration of long-term goals that cause us to risk things; and that it's the intrinsic utility of risk itself as encoded in the genome and proteome for the self-directed organisms we call humans. What I think is wrong is to take only a single terminology, and use it to say the other terminology is mistaken.
I think that, if you're going to post such a terribly immature and defamatory comment, and presumably do so from some perspective of "I was involved with Digg, I'm an insider," you have to provide some personal basis for it.

I think Jay's a good guy. It isn't his fault that Eric Schmidt walked away from the acquisition. And it isn't his fault that Kevin Rose would use his power as "founder of Digg" to arbitrarily dictate strategy -- only to return to doing "cool" things worth tweeting about once he had turned everything upside down. You don't have to take my word for it -- Kevin's illustrious Twitter feed speaks for itself.

You really need to get over yourself. You were a contract programmer who happened to work on the right project. Comments such as these give others pause to ever want to work with you. Jay, on the other hand... He never talks about what it's like to work alongside a complete nightmare like Kevin Rose. Never says a bad thing about him, or about the executives who would choose Kevin's stupid ideas over Jay's wisdom. Jay never said anything bad about Google or Eric Schmidt, who clearly lead him down a blind alley before running away.

And no, I'm not a friend of Jay's, or a friend of Kevin's, or an employee of Digg. Guess that's true for you as well, huh?
Some words from the great Churchill might aid: "Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, give up. Never give up. Never give up. Never give up."
Actually, none of the two items were on my mind: you are a member but you don't own the club to set the rules. You are just allowed to invite someone else in. I'm not sure manually whitelisting scales.
CNNArabic.com
I think it's more effective to train classifiers on users' voting logs and comments in order to maintain the quality and thoughtfulness of HN.
This allows you to classify all your users into classes that resemble their characters.
e.g. A genuine nice guy won't post mean comments and won't pick 'punish' a user he disagrees with.
A person who downvotes when he disagrees can be classified as such.
I'm sure a troll has a specific pattern too.

Then you can enable or disable aspects of the site for each user-category.
e.g. disable comments from trolls, disable downvoting for people who downvote when disagree as this stimulates groupthink, etc...

A set of users can serve as a training set for each category.
It is possible to let the 'genuine'-category classify comments from users from the other categories in order to enhance the classifiers.

Actually this is an interesting machine learning problem, I still need to pick a project for my course in machine learning so I can research this if I can get my hands on the datasets.
So the government owns the Amtrak trains but not the track ? What were they thinking ? That's exactly the opposite of what makes sense and what is already done with road and air transport.
Oh I see. You're using the term "smart drugs" in 2 different ways. One to mean 'intelligence enhancing' and the other 'a smart idea to take'. Kind of like a pun or some really corny anti-drugs commercial.
I think you need to do as reddit did -- hire a full time person as community manager (http://blog.reddit.com/2008/10/welcome-erik.html, http://www.reddit.com/user/hueypriest). You can only take technical tricks so far, community management is an AGI-hard problem.
I didn't spot where it said why the SFFD themselves manufacture the ladders (as opposed to buying them from somewhere). Should it really be the job of the SFFD to build ladders from raw materials?
>or else your definition of sane is very limited

or else your definition of gain is very limited.

You seem to be implying a mountain climber makes no gains by tackling Mt. Everest. The risk is not what is preferred, the sense of accomplishment and fulfillment is what is preferred. Without gains to be had, the mountain climber would cease to choose decreased lifespan unless they intrinsically enjoyed suffering.
Open source Mindcraft server
Creativity is a custom, from-scratch Minecraft SMP server developed by Tyler
Kennedy (aka TkTech). Its ultimate goal is to be an exact clone of the the
vanilla server with efficient, low-memory usage and the essential features
required for any game server (user management, chunk ownership, etc..).
www.wotsummary.com/map.html
Yeah, it's a different idea, but inspired by yours. Good point about scaling: perhaps your whitelist could include selected whitelists of others; you can aggregate whitelists.
Well, for us back then the only ways to lay hands on a good C compiler - except buying some extremely expensive proprietary software we could not afford (we all were under 20 and w/o regular income) - would have been via not-so-official channels (no comment...) and in the end more of a pain than it was worth it. For me at least, therefor, it was far more easier to develop on an Atari and then a Linux PC than it ever was for Apple's machines (before OSX).
Ask HN: Is Facebook benefiting from a ponzi scheme? a bubble?
In PG's essay about "what happend to yahoo":

> By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in.

Is Facebook in a similar situation today? They're not profitable, but investors are investing in them. They even acquire startups!!

As far as I can tell, all of Facebook's money comes from investments. They're getting bigger, but not because of any revenue they're actually making.

The founders got rich.

So economically, how does this work?

It seems to me like a bubble phenomenon:

Investment money => grow bigger => more investments.

The guys at the top of the pyramid benefit the most.

No actual revenue is being made.

I don't even know if they have a viable business model. I don't know the details of whether or not they're profitable yet, or how much they're making, but from what I'm reading around, they're either not profitable or the revenue they're actually making is very small. (Please do correct me).
Jeff wrote about PHP, the language does not matter: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/05/php-sucks-but-it-do...

I've never seen language choice as a big deal. It's just a tool among many others to get a product done.
This is what differentiates Arrington (and a rare few others) from a lot of other experts/bloggers - he is writing from the trenches, from the bottom of his heart/gut and from experience.

There are a lot of bloggers and self-proclaimed experts who are posers.

(Disclaimer: former tc employee)
FileBot - The ultimate tv renamer / subtitle downloader / sfv validator
FileBot is the ultimate tool for mass renaming your tv shows and anime and downloading subtitles from various sources. Check it out!
YAHS (Yet another Hari Seldon).
Innovation is always important. The iPhone was innovative. iOS was innovative. Without those two, we wouldn't be having this discussion. We would still be using Nokias and Blackberries, or Android phones which would be like Blackberries -- not the iPhone.

As far as paying for R&D goes, how much does it take to replicate something? I'd say a fraction of the cost since you already have the product in front of you. All you need to do is duplicate it.
Well, I sort of tried to say that - although, my impression is that it was harder to develop for Apple than DOS because of the unavailability of developer tools for Mac OS. Although I must admit I stuck to Atari to the bitter end and directly jumped to Linux, so my impression might be wrong. However, as you say, in any case, they faded away because of insufficient software and did solve that by opening up in OSX and having XCode and other stuff directly available. So, are they doing that again with their recent policies?
(warning: funny one)

Express the number in base 7. If the last digit is 0, then the number is divisible by 7. I win!
Fashion Accessories Trinket Boxes
>What I think is wrong is to take only a single terminology

Utility is a basic textbook economics term and the context of Arrington's article. Also, Arrington was an economics major. I think sticking to one terminology is highly preferable over acontextual obscurism.
And, if I may add, ever since Ubuntu (not that I like it, personally, but whatever) I've seen more people using Linux than ever before. Give it another ten years and they might have something really competitive on the end-user side, especially if Microsoft and Apple keep creeping more and more digital restriction management BS into their OS's.
I'm in almost the exact same situation as you. Just graduated this year, worked for a startup, then moved to SF with a relative to work on our own startup. Would love to meet you and chat, let me know.
right:

http://groups-announcements.blogspot.com/2010/09/notice-abou...
If I may ask - why is that so that you don't want to switch? The best reason IMO for following your model might be the increasing amounts of DRM we are seeing in the two big desktop alternatives. It honestly makes me think that there is no free software/open source future on the Apple, either (and I'll accept that RMS would probably mentally kill me just for thinking even that... :)).
9 Websites Stuck in the 1990's