skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is my question. 300 milliseconds is nice, but once you add HTTP overhead, then TLS overhead, it will be almost impossible for your site to respond to YOUR user in less than a second or two.

We'll see in 2011 I guess.
> But sadly modern world is too worried about my well-being to let me do something like that

Not really. Many of the people actually working towards going to Mars probably feel as you do. The problem is it's actually hard (technologically and politically).
I agree that money brings opportunities, but then the opportunities are the interesting thing, not the money. So, if your ambition is to start some fabulously expensive ventures, then you will no doubt need to pursue money with the greatest energy... but even so, the money is only there to serve your ambition.

To quote a story from my father's Nasrudin story site:

How much

In overseeing your possessions it helps to have a long term view. Not too long though. This reminds me of a story:

Every child can imagine the cavern of Ali Baba. But who on earth could have been able to picture the treasuries of Tamerlane? What is robbing a caravan compared with plundering twenty-seven kingdoms? For instance, eight hundred camels were insufficient to carry the gold pillaged only from Damascus. Nobody ever counted the wealth ravished from India… Rivers of gold and silver poured over the gravel of diamond and pearls at the feet of the Master. It was said that the loot gathered by Genghis Khan’s hordes ended up in Timur’s hands too. In Samarkand, like all over the empire, endless numbers of palaces, gardens and treasury chambers belonged all to one man – the Emir. Everything belonged to him.

Then, one cold winter day, on his way to conquering China, the old tyrant drunk too much arak and died. Unexpectedly, for the Iron Emir seemed immortal. After this event, Nasreddin hastened back to Horto, his childhood village. Even there, the death of the emperor was on people’s lips. Everybody wondered what wealth was bequeathed to his heirs by the great Tamerlane, richest man on earth.

“Hodja,” asked Camal the barber,” you lived at Tamerlane’s court, spent your day in his presence and luxury, saw his possessions. You must know. How much did he leave?”

Nasreddin, closed his eyes in concentration and counted for a while in his mind. At last he opened his eyes and said:

“Everything!”

see http://tenner.thinkhost.com/stories/index.php
Standard Web Journalism:

An Apple product where demand exceeds manufacturing capacity is a great success.

A Microsoft product where demand exceeds manufacturing capacity is a crisis.
In other, rather ironic, news, two Irishmen brutally assaulted a Swedish citizen on a ferryboat from Sweden to Finland. They were taken into custody on arrival in Finland, but were later released because the crime occurred on Swedish waters. The men subsequently returned to Ireland.

The Swedish police decided to drop the case irrespective of ample CCTV evidence and both men having pleaded guilty. Quoting prosecutor Thomas Holst: "Were we to try to get everyone suspected of a less serious crime extradited, we would have to work around the clock."
What You Should Know About History Sniffing
I agree. Some people, like defence contractors do make lots of money with war, though.
Google Shows Off Android 'Honeycomb' Tablet
I'm guessing that the dual core chip on this android device might be a derivative of the NVIDIA Tegra. Although this wouldn't make sence that the GPU is off the die?
He talks about Murdoch's actions in "1958" but then says that his actions are happening nearly a century later. Was that date inaccurate? Because 52 years doesn't strike me as a full nearly-a-century.
The obvious comparison seems like it would be with Amazon RDS
Sad. I really wanted to see the promised documents about UFOs. In my opinion, it would raise much more noise in the society.
With Assange in the courtroom: http://twitter.com/#!/newsbrooke
I am not sure if an app running on a different cloud platform like (Google App Engine / Azure / etc.,) can make use of Database.com and still provide decent response time to user requests.

This service will be helpful for pre-generating reports having queries which span across multiple tables (JOINS) and which can use aggregate queries (SUM/COUNT/MAX/MIN/etc.,.), both of which are currently not possible with Google App Engine's BigTable. But with Google already working on full-featured SQL database support (http://code.google.com/appengine/business/roadmap.html), I don't think I will use it for such an use-case too.
I love unfiltered information, but there was something pathetic about seeing Mallory's corpse in that picture -- just a frozen, eroded lump of meat.

There's a reason we don't see more pictures of our dead heros.
There are other cloud-based database services out there - and from my (fairly limited) experience the latency involved is rather noticeable.

It might be different if you do bulk uploads of data and then spend a lot of time querying it and retrieving relatively small reports - but that's probably not what most applications spend their time doing.
If all wikileaks was doing was publishing information about illegal or highly suspect acts by the government it'd be one thing. But that isn't all they're doing, and it is these other releases that has really pissed me off. For instance, what legitimate purpose does it serve to release a list of infrastructure that are critical to national security? (http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jWvPaI6hI...)

If diplomacy is so important to the people of the world, why are so many people cheering on the fact that wikileaks has made it almost impossible for diplomats to give frank and honest assessments of the countries in which they work? When wikileaks makes everything "transparent", everything becomes opaque, because no diplomat will write any memos or share information with one another. Wikileaks is a tremendous blow to anyone who wants to see international problems come to a peaceful and diplomatic resolution.
the money is only there to serve your ambition.

unless you are Felix Dennis - http://sivers.org/book/HowToGetRich
That's false dichotomy.

Paying per copy is not the only possible way of compensating creators.
The L2 Digital IQ Index: Public Sector
And on the other hand, it may and mostly does increase the chance of stomach bleed. Isn't that the case and a good reason to not pop it like mints ?
AFAIK they already have statements to that effect, he made them earlier while he was still in the country.
Video Game Designers Play to Solve Real-World Problems
Swiss Shut Down WikiLeaks' Bank Account
How so? (I am not talking of death because of old age).
Is there a better source? I'm not sure I'm inclined to believe anything rixstep says.
No, I mean that that particular method wouldn't work for me at all. Were I to pirate something, I wouldn't need the reminder. Sorry that that's unclear.

EDIT: And yes, it's definitely an interesting experiment. I'd like to see some sort of results from it - implicit A/B testing numbers, for example.
The Pentagon was not attacked to disrupt military capability. That would consistute a military target. It was attacked for the symbolic value.
Nike Air Force 1 Classic Mid,Mens Classic Mid Shoes Discount At kickaf1.com
If Kickstarter becomes popular, it'll become overwhelmed by fraudulent projects -- people creating simple renderings and/or videos to raise hundreds of thousands and then just disappearing with the money. Then thousands of people will start demanding money back from Kickstarter. Then comes the very bad press. Who wants that? I think it's fine just where it is, but I still wouldn't mind seeing a chart on how many funded projects never get delivered vs. those that do.
That's a nice fable. But it also reminded me another thing we could use a lot of money for is to make such fables meaningless.

Like by funding cryonics and friendly AI research - http://lesswrong.com/tag/cryonics/

http://singinst.org/
Would it kill them to spend two minutes checking for spelling mistakes / typos?

Poor reporting aside, I think this product is... no, I don't know, because the article gave no concrete information at all. Except of course that it's in the cloud!
Visa suspends all payments to WikiLeaks
I like the ML languages a lot, OCaml could be a java replacement.

There is the industry acceptance part that java has and then the runtime has been pretty well vetted and improved. I'd bet money that ML runtimes turn up with "issues" as larger more demanding applications are built.

And what exactly is going on with SML these days?
Searching for the Spark of Creative Problem-Solving
I think it's more about temperament. Some people start business with the major objective of making money; others look to build something or test something or prove that their theory is right. I think his point was that no one way is "better" -- that they are both legitimate. But if you're someone who is motivated by building an empire, focusing on money won't do you any favors... and vice versa.
> where their mummified remains will stand for years to come as a grim reminder that someone left them behind.

where their mummified remains will stand for years to come as a grim reminder of their awesomeness.

Fixed that for you.
By "pirates", I mean an average /b/tard who downloads software just because it's there to steal. I didn't make the point clear at all. If I were to pirate a piece of software, I wouldn't consider myself a "pirate" - mostly because I'd pay for it if I found it extremely useful.

I guess I should work on making my points clear, eh?
I guess the trick is to make sure your servers are close to the database... like running on force.com ;-)

I guess for most sites, users won't really notice a few hundred milliseconds. I mean, most websites take many seconds to load when you factor in all the individual files and images, etc.

UX performance is more about perceived delay (by end-users, not us technical folk) rather than actual delay. If you want to use a product like this so you no longer have to think about your database (and are willing to pay what seem to be quite high fees), design your application to account for the fact that there will be large amounts of lag... that's what parallelisation and non-blocking IO is for.
Because money is only useful because of what it can afford you. Why do you want to make money? The answer to that is the true objective.
Test Your Creative Insight - Interactive Feature
The battle if talks about took place about ninety-five years ago.
Am I just cynical, or does anyone else get the overall impression that this is a bunch of geeks running around fantasising that they're in 'The Matrix' or something. And doing it thanks to the efforts of a single confused 22 year old (Manning), who is now screwed.

Some of the material I've read so far is interesting. Very little surprises me. None shocks me.

There is no technological achievement here, either in the original leak, or the distribution of the material. If anything, I get the impression that Wikileaks is fairly inept.

I'm not really against the leak - I've enjoyed reading the material. One of the things (genuinely) that I've found fascinating is the quality of the writing - I wish some of the people I work with could write as well.

Irritating people do get to me though, and I'm beginning to lump Assange in with Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia, and Wikileaks both have larger than life, seemingly egocentric figureheads. Both services depend heavily on the efforts and religious-level fervour of other people who often do things for free or near-free.

Weird? I mean, if I ran a web site that distributed material which might get a governmental back up, I would probably keep a low profile.

Looking forward to some robust comments on my thoughts!
That's right.

I'm still not convinced that you couldn't drive an IRDA diode with TV remote data and have it work, though, at least on consumer units running at 870nm.
There are two separate dates. 1958 is a Rupert Murdoch quote and "nearly a century" ago is Rupert's father Keith re: World War I.
Reminds me of the old saw, "There are two types of computer users: programmers and victims."
For fear of making it a political debate, I will humble refrain from any more comment.

Only one point: Neither Iraq war nor War in Afghanistan is justified by ANY argument at all.

If WikiLeak is so powerful then it should have exposed how Bush conspired to destroy these two countries, kill millions of people over there and get its own soldiers killed in a war no one can justify.

Michael Moore did more to expose the wrongness of Iraq war through his book "Dude, Where's my Country" then WikiLeak can claim to have done. Michael Moore was the first American celebrity who opposed Iraq war from Oscar podium and for that he was booed. He stood against the general public sentiment and two years down the line, people realized how right he was. Please read that book if you can, you can find some information about that book in Wikipedia, here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dude,_Where%27s_My_Country%3F
regards.
My email is in my profile: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jemptymethod

BTW I own several compelling domain names related to this project "deskml" and it's tagline: powering "the desk wide web". Plus a compelling domain name for my ebook/javascript idea.

Glad there may be some interest, I have another startup idea, so if somebody rips this off I have a fall-back position ;) This one is just so compelling though, I'm willing to take the initial risk.
Google Nexus S UK And US Pricing Revealed
Can you become influential on Twitter by tweeting every minute?
Climbing Mt. Everest has nothing to do with exploration, and hasn't had for a long time.

It's an industry catering to reckless thrill-seekers.
100 tablets, 50p.

http://www.chemistdirect.co.uk/dispersible-aspirin-tablets-7...

(Ok, there's shipping too, but if you're buying a bunch of stuff it's not that bad.)
I agree. I don't get it. Are we this desperate for a hero that we'll romanticize the average in order to have one?
I think a better comparison would be Amazon Simple DB in terms of its use of the cloud, but amazon RDS in terms of its relational model.
Julian Assange mentions a young Rupert Murdoch writing in 1958 and suggests that the Murdoch's observation reflected on the latter's father's actions in World War 1 nearly 100 years ago. Within Australia the date is probably understood from cultural memory/context.
...given the gap between white and black scores, I wonder how the US would do if you ranked it based only on white scores.

Also, when judging how well a country will do in science you should not look at the average, but rather at the top.

What would be the point of such exclusions and comparisons?

I don't think that these surveys are merely meant to find out which countries are leading in certain subjects. Of course you can look at it that way, but I think a better way to look at it is to see it as a measure of how well each country's education system is doing at educating its students on average.

I think it's great if our top students are at the top worldwide in science, but I'm still really, really concerned that the US education system is failing to educate the average student.
Years ago, we're talking late '80s, I would take normal office workers, with essentially zero computer experience, and have them creating useful applications with Apple's HyperCard in a few weeks. It was tremendously useful, but not with out pitfalls. One worker would make a tool, say a bibliographic utility, another worker would think this is great and get a copy and immediately start making their own modifications and mutation. You can see where this is going...

Still I can see that with better tools and some type of data authority, users could greatly benefit from being able to roll their own apps.

I had hoped that the web would offer the same the same types of opportunities, but web programming quickly became a mess, or more charitably, too complicated for general office workers to program.
And falsifiability....
possibly, they expect you tu build most logic in store procedures so that you can minimize calls.

Also, once you cache them to avoid hitting a backend xSQL store you can also cache them to avoid hitting a remote SQL store, I imagine.
PhoneGap certainly speeds mobile development along, and hopefully jQuery Mobile will support Android too, but until then I will stick with PhoneGap+jQuery vanilla.
Google’s Andy Rubin explains the Nexus One flop
No.

He's talking about Rupert Murdoch's writings, in 1958, reflecting on Keith Murdoch's revelations about Gallipoli.

Keith Murdoch was Rupert's father. The Gallipoli campaign happened during WWI, in 1915-1916, nearly a century ago.
HeadJS: A Quick Review
The Best Movies for Programmers
As a software engineer, I disagree. I think more people should spend more effort learning how to write software.

Every day I see people doing jobs that would be better completed by automated systems, or human-assisted automated systems. If these end-users would 'wake up' and realise that every time they do something more than once they can automate the task, they would live happier lives.

I think problem solving, researching and programming skills should form part of the core curriculum for school-aged kids. Learning to learn and research are much more valuable than being able to recall facts that will be forgotten 5 minutes in the future.
Superior 'theory of mind' in borderline personality
Database.com is so ugly and unprofessional looking I at first thought it was a spam site and actually had to double check the URL.
Windows Azure – How Much Is It Costing Me?
Facebook Has It All Wrong When It Comes To Social Games
we're working on it right now :)
In America, it looks like low-dose 81mg is around 1 to 2 cents per dose. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dhp...

Who says our healthcare is more expensive?
>>I think .Net is poised to capture much of Java's current market.

> Anyone leaving Java because of Oracle is not going to .Net.

I agree that folks who abandon Java because of Oracle's presence are unlikely to embrace Microsoft, but that doesn't mean that .Net won't continue to erode Java's market share.

Specifically, consider the many shops that employ both Java and .Net. In those environments, I could see .Net's adoption accelerating due to the perception of strife within the Java community: James Gosling and Tim Bray both leaving Oracle, Jonathan Schwartz pitching litigation over Java patents as a revenue stream, the subsequent lawsuit against Google, the OpenSolaris and OpenOffice.org votes of no confidence and subsequent forks, Apache attempting to throw a wrench into the JCP... that's not the picture of a healthy ecosystem.

So it's not that the enterprises will see Oracle and flee, but that they'll see the turmoil and litigation, reason that C# and Java are similar enough, and opt for the more peaceful of the two, at least for new development.
I've noticed something interesting about this service. They mention that they support row-level security. If they also support anything like stored procedures, you could basically allow your service to contact database.com directly from the side - no hosting- roundtrip.
Diaspora branch with xmpp federation support
Oh, that's the other core tenant that normal office workers need to be taught. Source/version control.

The amount of issues I've had with exchanging and modifying Excel/Word documents via email with groups of people is uncountable. Some basic understanding of version-controlled file-systems (like git or svn) with users writing actual comments on how they have modified their files would make this type of editing much, much easier.
Here's the Australian infrastructure that is listed as critical to US national security:

"Australia: Southern Cross undersea cable landing, Brookvale, Australia Southern Cross undersea cable landing, Sydney, Australia Manganese -- battery grade, natural; battery grade, synthetic; chemical grade; ferro; metallurgical grade Nickel Mines Maybe Faulding Mulgrave Victoria, Australia: Manufacturing facility for Midazolam injection. Mayne Pharma (fill/finish), Melbourne, Australia: Sole suppliers of Crotalid Polyvalent Antivenin (CroFab)."

Maybe if you worked at the Crotalid plant making rattlesnake antivenin and you might like to know that you were a possible terrorist target due to your role in safeguarding the US.

Or if you worked at a nickel mine somewhere.

How critical are these, exactly - I'm not sure.
Salesforce.com Launches Database.com: Enterprise-Ready Cloud Databases
I use IRC a lot, for both asking and responding other users questions, I also like to read other people questions in mailing lists.

Asking and responding interesting put me in contact with great programmers, tools and problems that otherwise I will not be exposed to.

I specially enjoy the emacs IRC and mailing list, I always learn small tricks that boost my editor knowledge.
Jason Fried: How to Kill a Bad Idea
To show how ridiculous some of the secrets are and to dissuade governments for keeping so many of them?

The post office tower - a 600ft tall microwave relay with a revolving restaurant on top - in central london is secret.
It didn't appear on maps and any mention of it was removed from parliament reports.
> Taking any substantial risks to the living to recover bodies is completely unacceptable

Why? This is a cultural conclusion that can be debated and modified. People are already risking their lives just by being on Everest, so it can't just be risking life == bad.
Being able to read source is not the same as open source. (That's where the term `free software' and it's conotations are useful.)
And so it seems that the surest way to get downvoted on Hacker News is to say something bad about Julian Assange. Boringly predictable.
November 2010 C++ Standards Committee Mailing
You cannot be held for 90 days in the UK. That was where the previous government tried to get to, but they were blocked. It currently stands that you can be held for 28 days without trial, and the government have to renew that every 6 months.
>"He's writing about results that were validated through replication. That is the scientific method."

Experiments confirming phlogiston were validated through replication. The theory of phlogiston was however, incorrect. That's the problem with the scientific method.
I mostly travel in ND, SD, and MN. B&N has better prices, better selection, and a much better membership. Also, their stores seem much nicer and they have longer hours.
Well maybe I'm like Felix Dennis, and I want to earn money just for the heck of earning money. Choose your own motives, but don't tell me what should or should not be my motive.
I think the CAD renderings are of a very high quality.
> In the field, you never leave anyone behind . Never!

This mentality is encouraged because otherwise it would be harder to recruit soldiers, but it's bad strategy. There are times when the success of a mission may depend on leaving someone behind.

EDIT> Just as the "never leave anyone behind" meme is an artificial construct, you might be able to train a force with a culture of "I will never force my mates to have to rescue me". Warrior culture is a construct.
7 Reasons Why You Should Be An Internet Entrepreneur
Software design mistakes that Diaspora needs to fix.
I think it is geared more towards mobile apps, which rely on remote db calls anyway.
I am sure this is the number 1 concern for them. If they don't solve this then they have just screwed themselves over.

Bigger concern: How exportable is this database (my guess is very, since its a resful api to access it all) because at some point if they fail, you going to need to move to your own cluster.
Celebrities Choose Proenza Schouler PS1 Bags
Can this be compared to fathom db? http://fathomdb.com/about/home

Do we have anyone with experience with FDB on hn?
Circumventing Adobe DRM for EPUB
Who's been calling to kidnap his son? I did a quick (1 minute) google search, but couldn't find a source.