skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure it's necessarily harder now to launch a new network. Obviously it's going to be harder to launch something similar to what's already out there, but I suspect that truly novel services are actually easier to spread the word about because the velocity of information is so much higher. Do something really cool, and you'll be splashed across the Twtterverse in a matter of hours.
I do know why this was downvoted, but it was a sincere advcie.
> exceedingly bad reason

It depends on the context. If it's a developer's side project, why not? If it's a businessperson's project that you are under contract to build, then yes, it's a bad reason.
284, what now?

EDIT: Nevermind, that was easy.
I totally agree. I get much further showing my personal side projects than I do my resume.
I've been stuck on step 8 for 7 minutes =\
Good point. When I wrote that what I had in mind is puzzle-like positions where strategic planning is required. For example see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_(chess)#Defense_perime... (Petrosian vs Hazai).

My real point here is that no chess program incorporates strategy the way humans do, and that it is unfortunate that this goal isn't being pursued.
When did you say that neither group is superior? You said that "hackers" don't have to be more skilled, but every other part of your post implies that you think they're superior as human beings.
I want links I can review

What do you think of this? http://sourceforge.net/projects/timeandmoney/.

I haven't used the library, but its author (Eric Evans) is an old Smalltalker who wrote a good book, Domain Driven Design, in which the examples are in Java. The book is immersed in OO but also kind of points the way beyond OO into something more like "how to develop domain languages", which I find more interesting.
I would like to write a TCP server with node.js can accept 1000s of client connection. Each client would need to publish about 1 timestamp a second to a queue that is unique for the client. That same client would also need to be able to subscribe to one other clients queue, and have that data pushed to it when it get published. The data would not need to persist at all, if there is not a subscriber who wants it discard it.

Any tips on how I should go about doing this? I would like some type of solution that could scale if I put a load balancer in front of it. I have been thinking about using some type of PubSub queue, maybe zeromq, maybe a XMPP server.
I just recently moved to a new job, the recruiting was based solely on reputation, I basically had the job before anyone talked to me or saw a resume. This was a new thing for me. To be completely honest it felt great, a wonderful validation.

I'm hard on myself and while I take pride in my work and what I've accomplished I always focus on the things I'm not great at. That sounds negative, and it probably is, but I think it has its plus side, and I'm not sure I can be, or want to be, any other way. But apparently I've done enough good things, and handled myself in a way that really good people want to recommend me.

Gratifying, but also a little scary. I'm comfortable with the pressure I put on myself, but the prospect of letting other people down, people I think a lot of, is unsettling.

A recommendation is, and the more vocal it is (and the more of them there are) the more it becomes -- a very generous gift, and with it comes a lot of responsibility of a different kind.

The resume route might be harder, but it has its positives. Easier to exceed expectations.
Will Wattvision someday be able to tap into the (GE) SmartMeter data that already exists? I'm in a multi-unit condo and my wifi closet is a few hundred feet from our meter stack. Is there any way to interrogate the meter via the onboard mesh radio?
hahaha... if there's a finite number of people, there's a finite amount of attention.
I don't do software security professionally, or have any other way of validating Dancho's legitimacy. It's not that I don't trust ZDNet - I was simply ceding the possibility that the parent was right on that point since I had no "proof" to the contrary. I apologize if it came across as me lending credence to the idea that Dancho may be a hack, I meant it in the sense that I was unable to positively confirm his reputation in the field (since I am not in it) but I should have been more clear :)
How ironic, that anyone working in HR would make fun of the CV of any engineer, no matter how bad.
I think he meant:

Single-threaded entirely gets rid of the need for locking and critical sections (so long as you don't need exclusive access to a resource for longer than a single callback), and evented lets you recover some of the concurrency you lost by sticking to a single thread (if you're IO-bound and you code carefully).

In a single-threaded event framework, even if two external events fire simultaneously, their callbacks will be serialised because there's only one thread to run them in, so it's as if they fired at slightly different times. There'll be some latency processing the "second" event of course, but not too much so long as the callback of the "first" event doesn't take long (hence the "code carefully" part).
I assume you're that Mikko Hypponen?

http://mikko.hypponen.com/
Www.Theenergydetective.com is another option. I think I paid $135 and found $50/month savings right away.
Learn Python the Hard way Class At PyCon 2011
I like it, it can be humanized a bit more like:

var app = express.Application(); // let me create apps, not servers
app.get('/', app.do('index',req,res));
app.run(); // set port in config.js

I'll keep an eye on express.
Cool. As I stated above, I did not mean to suggest that he was one, simply that I didn't know enough to take a position.
Teflon is Du Pont's brand name for polytetrafluoroethylene. Gore-Tex is Gore & Associates's brand name for thermo-mechanically expanded polytetrafluoroethylene. Gore-Tex is commonly used to make pants. Given that you wrote "Teflon" in lower-case, they probably qualify as "teflon pants" to you.
I've done some long-running benchmarks of EC2, mostly for kicks and personal edification. For about 8 months now, I've had a job running on an EC2 "small" instance, that performs a suite of microbencharks every 10 seconds and records the results. Lots of raw data can be found here:

http://amistrongeryet.com/dashboard.jsp

This covers a variety of AWS operations, ranging from simple EC2 CPU benchmarks to SimpleDB and RDS operations. I also include some measurements of Google App Engine. I've put a lot of focus on measuring variation over time, and measuring outliers (i.e. 99.9th percentile, not just mean). I'd like to measure variation across instances, but haven't gotten around to it.

The web site linked above has no documentation at the moment, and is a bit broken in other ways, but the data may be of interest. I have a little blog (http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/) where I've discussed some of my findings, e.g. http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2010/04/early-results-on-..., http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2010/04/beginnings-of-rob..., and http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2010/04/cloud-data-storag....

If there's interest, I'll put a little effort into cleaning up and documenting the data reporting site.
US power grid becoming steadily less reliable
Retorting An Extremely Bias View Against Android
Oh, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It's not effectively a zero-sum game until you near saturation. Before that point, the dynamics are the same as for an infinite resource.

How's about a game of poker with grains of sand as chips?

Second, you already admitted that the amount of attention can grow. There's only a finite amount of wealth represented in the balance sheets of everyone alive on the planet right this second, but no one claims wealth is a Zero Sum Game because there's no clear upper bound.

Oh, and BTW, hahaha...
Criminals are smart enough to remove the battery, or not carry a cell phone during a major crime. So this mostly just enables the government and telecom companies to track law-abiding citizens.
Huh!? I've been getting a 500 since the thing started, haven't even be able to get to step 2.
In 2011, there are a finite number of people whose attention a person could have. Each of those people has a finite number of seconds of attention to devote. Wealth cannot yet increase that number, though it can enable you to devote attention to other things.

Fame and status are not like wealth; they are zero sum.
I found the logic of this essay to be less than stellar. He rejects early animal-based experiments on learning, but says that Cybernetics is a more promising arena. But he doesn't address his original complaint, that human minds are different than those experimental subjects.

He also made some logical leaps without citations for his sources, nor explanations of the logic used to reach his conclusions.

I get his main point - that people need to become self-aware and teach themselves techniques for their own self improvement. But how can a 6 year old do that? They are simply not yet developed. The human brain is not done developing until one's mid-twenties. That needs to be accounted for when proposing educational changes.

The fact that he presented that had the most substance was that "genius" was strongly correlated with early childhood environments that encouraged very active use of the child's own imagination.

From all of this,I'd be much more apt to draw the conclusion that to improve education, we should just all throw out our TVs.
Is this really the best article that HN has to offer today?

Resumes are not dead. It's just a summary of your accomplishments. If your accomplishments are outstanding, you'll get noticed. Otherwise, you don't.
Debunking The Startup Myth: Finding The Right Team
Now we have two problems.
I immediately wanted to purchase this for our business. My enthusiasm was greeted by a server error msg on the mobile site, with no way of viewing the full site...

:/
The model works but sometimes the listings are a bit too grounded.

http://www.airbnb.com/rooms/67624?price=15
>My concern about for-profit [services] is that its interest is focused more on the investor and less on the [customer].

Funny how elsewhere the profit motive aligns suppliers' actions to the demands of their extant and would-be customers, since to do otherwise would be to go out of business. Perhaps the issue here is that multiple levels of taxpayer subsidies yields a system of perverse incentives.
dmoz is complete b/s - if you don't know a moderator there, you're basically SOL.

You'll be in that queue for a year (or infinitely) unless things have changed significantly
Is not a solely engineering role. I am leading a team and a product as well (which will most likely be just me for a couple of months). Which is actually what I'd expect from first engineer hires on a startup. But thanks a lot for the perspective.
The trend for HR to be inundated with so many resumes that the good ones fall through has much more to do with the current unemployment rate than with the resume being "dead"
As he rightly points zero sum would mean that whenever something attracts our attention something else is losing its share to fame. But the 'axiom' that fame is a zero sum quantity is be now measurable way true. In some cases if something excite as that means that we will loose interest in something else. But this is not general true. And this is the beauty of new ideas. They can generate interest from zero.

In addition he did not say that fame is infinite so as to make your laughter justifiable. He just pointed and I agree with him that fame is not by default a zero sum thing
if you don't have a strong resume, then follow the advice rather than give up. But first at least try to make sure your resume looks good :) the two are not really mutually exclusive
So there's only one kind of smart now?

One of the reasons I'm not an entrepeneur is that it involves dealing with people and money. I prefer dealing with code.
Roll your own toy UNIX-clone OS
Off topic, but what do you listen to that takes up 350GB? Is everything in FLAC?
I looked through the site and found this: http://www.behaviorwizard.org/wp/behavior-grid/

It really makes you think about behavior change in a much clearer way.
There are babies born every minute but the number of famous people an average person cares to remember remains relatively constant.
What Jesus' page can tell us about Wikipedia's history
When I first graduated, I took all of the interesting things I had made over the years in my spare time (non school work material: a crappy threads library in C, a packet injector for an exotic network protocol, a patch to the linux kernel that got committed, etc) and put them on a web page and made sure people looked at it.

It was instrumental to help get me a job early in my career. I had no contacts and I do not interview well at all.

However, such portfolios need to be kept current with newer and better code. I've discovered that in my most recent job search, it did not help so much because most of the code is stagnant.
CSS3 Flip Clock Look
A finite number is always finite, even if it's so large that you can't comprehend it in normal human terms.

Oh, and arguably the amount of fame there is to be had is nowhere near unfathomable. I can list off the top of my head probably hundreds of "famous people", and I don't give a shit about celebrity. The only limit there is my memory, not a lack of famous people to think about. Our culture is absolutely packed with famous people, it's pretty clearly saturated.

"no one claims wealth is a Zero Sum Game"

Objectively wrong.
Yeah, I think Stay Puft should be mandatory in all big-stack-of-stuff infographics.
I can give express a thumbs up. I came from a python-flask environment, and express provided a way for me to quickly get the gist of javascript object-models and message passing.

(I'm not a CS guy, I just wanted to finish a digital art project involving buses and geolocation).
This tutorial is rather out-of-date and, while it goes a lot farther than the other recent OS link here, takes a long time to do very little.

A more recent tutorial that goes much farther: it describes virtual memory, processes and scheduling, user space and system calls, even a simple in-memory VFS. Link is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2107618
I mentioned I'd be getting a bit higher than market salary. I've worked on my own startup for a few months until my co-founders split, and I was unselected for a seed incubator program as a solo founder (no big surprises here). The rest of team is pretty much being built, but they are seriously taking into consideration Sequoia's tips (which is referred from pg's lib http://ycombinator.com/lib.html): http://www.sequoiacap.com/ideas
Some of git's learning curve reputation is historical. Some good effort as been put into making git less arcane.
Playboy Inc. in need of Viagra
Eclipse with PyDev with a Vi emulator (can't remember which one offhand). Having been something of an Eclipse skeptic in the past (despite being a Visual Studio devotee) I have to say I'm really quite impressed with it. It certainly makes navigating larger Python projects somewhat easier. Eclipse certainly seems no worse than VS for bloat or memory usage - although I guess that's not saying much :)

That said, if I'm just knocking out a single script or something, I'll just drop straight into vim.

(Oh, on Windows, almost exclusively)
Demand Media Gives Price Range for I.P.O.
I like visiting Quora(http://www.quora.com) and Stack Overflow(http://stackoverflow.com/) once in a while. I also visit LinkedIn's Answers Section.
I say that hackers don't have to be more skilled (superior - in my personal definition of the term).

I also state that I believe they more often than not are more skilled (which I recognize and appropriately tag as my own opinion, not a fundamental part of the concept)
It looks strange to me that High-CPU Instances didn't come as clear winners in compilation tests. I thought of choosing only between c1.medium and c1.xlarge for my CPU-intensive tasks. Looks like I should look closely into all types of instances instead, except for micro and small.

According to the specs Amazon gives us, "High-Memory" instances have 3.25 Compute Units per virtual core, while "High-CPU" only 2.5. It would be interesting to know what is going on: are their compilation tests unable to properly utilize many cores, or the nodes assigned to "High-Memory" instances tend to have more powerful hardware, or what?
it is my understanding that Wattvision taps the entire electrical system via the meter, not just a single outlet like a $15 "kill-a-watt" style power meter will.
I wonder how many thousands of people are paying them to back up stuff they could easily redownload. Great business model if they de-dupe internally.
This is a fantastic idea. Zed, if you want others to hang out in the room and make themselves available for when people get stuck, just say so. I would help, and I'm sure others would too.
> Yes, that's pretty much the human intuition for why no one doubts that White will win. But it is very, very far from a mathematical proof.

White will win if he plays perfectly: this is mathematically assured because white has an advantage of nine points. The only way for white to lose or to draw is by extreme error. The article assumes a perfect game, so I too assume that white will play a perfect game.

> Let me remind you that each ply has a branching factor of about 20, which means each move has a branching factor of several hundred. In most positions you'd be lucky to be able to calculate even one or two forced exchanges, let alone all the way to the end of the game.

As I recall, Deep Blue was calculating at a depth of more than eight moves...

> The Deep Blue chess computer which defeated Kasparov in 1997 would typically search to a depth of between six and eight moves to a maximum of twenty or even more moves in some situations. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_(chess_computer)

I find it difficult to believe that this wouldn't have improved or could not be improved upon, since this was based on the technology available in 1997. It's safe to say we've made progress since then.

While you may not be able to calculate an entire game, you could certainly calculate all the exchanges required to reach a properly winnable and calculable endgame. This is pretty damn close to being able to calculate a whole game...and you're assured victory.

As I said, once you get to a point of two kings and a queen, it's trivial.
It's also possible to have completely random answers, with a key at the bottom....
This is a really creative way for dropbox to engage their customers.
I use DBAN to wipe hard drives before disposal. If you are replacing a failed drive, the only reasonable thing you can do is physically destroy the platters.
Original source for most of this is at

http://www.jackofallclouds.com/2010/12/recounting-ec2/
Sure, that'd be great.

We should do t-shirts too. :-)
Any company that lets HR do the screening of the engineers is probably doing it wrong.

Every job I've gotten is from networking. Submitting my CV has just been an after-the-fact formality.
Feeling superior, much?
I would add:

#11: Not realizing you can't imagine your future accurately.

Some changes you make are so significant it's like you are playing a whole new game. If you don't realize this, then you will not be a good judge of whether to make the change.

For example, let's say you enjoy playing basketball. Someone comes up holding a football and invites you to play football. You don't realize that he's talking about a new game with new rules and a new environment. You look at his oddly-shaped ball and imagine yourself trying to dribble that ball down the court. You conclude that you wouldn't enjoy football.

I've made numerous significant life changes, among them becoming vegan and going car-free. Both of those decisions are game-changing and so it's really hard to imagine yourself making those changes; you really have to just try it for a while before making up your mind.

For veganism, I often hear people say "I could never give up X" or "What do you eat?". They imagine themselves no longer eating their favorite foods, not realizing that after adjusting to veganism their palate will change and they'll have different favorite foods. And they also don't realize the abundance of vegan foods out there because they've never had an incentive to look, so they just assume they'd be eating salads all the time.

Ditching my car was another game-changer. I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you are in a well-designed city. I moved from Norfolk, Virginia to Boston, Massachusetts and ditched my car in the process. If I had imagined myself in the environment of Norfolk without a car, I would have never been tempted to do so. But I had visited Boston and also had lived for a while in Germany without a car and so I knew what it was like to live in a well-designed city without a car. Even so, I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of cost and inconvenience I was getting rid of by not having a car: no more gas-filling eating away my time and money, no more large key fobs filling up my pockets, no more having to ask my friends if they know a good mechanic, no more driving around forever looking for a parking space, etc. etc. All the inconveniences of owning a car were somewhat invisible beforehand and they didn't become quite so apparent until after actually ditching the car.

tl;dr: if you're making a significant life change, you can't accurately imagine what your new situation will be like by extrapolating from your past experiences.
The experiment infrastructure at Google
If you took all of those drives apart and put the spindles in a pile you'd have a big pile of motors. The Petabox consumes 6kW so let's be generous and call it 60kW of servo motors.

60kW is roughly 80hp. (I know this is a specious comparison in several ways but bear with me.) 80hp is enough power a small but highway-capable motorcycle. A single 60kW brushless DC motor weighs over 100kg. That's heavier than a good many of us HN readers.

Imagine a motor like that bolted to one long spindle of large platters--say the 99cm platters from a 1961 hard drive.

If these platters were remade with the data density of modern 2TB drives, how tall would the spindle be if this giant hard drive had a 10PB capacity? How over- or under-sized would our motor be?