skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Economic power is earned justly (by offering better/more efficient/lower priced goods and services),

This often happens justly. It doesn't always happen justly. For example, sometimes buying from merchant A is "more efficient" because merchant A has defacto dictatorial power and a variety of ways of making your life miserable if you buy from anyone else.

and monopolies obtained and maintained this way are desirable.

I am dealing with a monopoly based on the political power of a certain local music venue owner. If the free market were in operation in this case, amateur musicians of a certain local music scene would play jam sessions at an entirely different pub for a number of reasons. We are somewhat held hostage at our current venue, because of our friendships with professional musicians. None of us dare start a session inside the loop because of the political fallout. So we put up with the barman who doesn't care for us, his turning the stage lights on us until we sweat (it's not a paid gig, for heaven's sake!) and the utter inattention, ignorance, and apathy of the crowd. Our particular town's instance of this particular music scene suffers artistically for this, as better musicians don't show up, and some talented out of town musicians don't want to join in.

They lose market share only when company stops being virtuous.

Sometimes a company stops being virtuous, and keeps market share.
The Nook is literally a 7" Android tablet. (Capacitive multitouch screen, same CPU and GPU as Droid X). And a pretty good one once you root it, which consists of inserting an SD card and turning it on.
Aka The No True Scotsman Fallacy
HN, because PG never asked for any personal information. I've never had a FB account because they do . . .
Charlie Sheen is also a ginormous klutz! What does he have to do with this discussion (besides the fact that he's a rockstar who should be a part of all discussions)? Nothing. Neither does Microsoft.
XMission (a smaller ISP) on exactly why we need net neutrality
Perhaps more accurately, it doesn't work well for those involved who don't have power. Puppet governments seem to do quite well for themselves, as do the colonizers.
I've never been tempted by AppArmor because SELinux is awesome. The learning curve is brutal, but when it works, it's beautiful.

You configure a targeted policy for a daemon, and that policy describes all of the reasonable behaviour profiles for the daemon. Files and directories are assigned contexts referenced by the policies.

If it attempts to write to a directory that isn't part of its normal context, permission denied. Open an abnormal socket? denied. Abnormal IPC? denied.
Econ 101: product with a life span of at least 3 years.

http://www.esa.doc.gov/about-economic-indicators
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durable_good
This is a nice catalog of algorithms to study to home your analytical skills and a good place to start if you are doing sequence matching outside of the usual text matching.
ill never understand why someone so far ahead lowers himself like this. in american politics this is what a vice president is for.
Take a look at "Reading Rate: A Review of Research and Theory", by Ronald P. Carver.

His conclusion is that, basically, speed reading doesn't work beyond being able to skim read for the general points of a book or article.
Idea: Take reading material from your Instapaper & Twitter (more services later) and suggest you the best ones out of all to read.

I don't have time to read 1000 links that cross my way and most of them I miss out. So just gives me the best and improves suggestions based on reading habits.

I've the factors I decided to rank the articles. Can mail you the flow-chart or something?
Should a health, beauty, or wellness practitioner do Groupon?
This might very well be true in the current environment where there are only some isolated cases where people give stuff away for free.

But things might very well be different if it becomes the default mode for everyone. If you give something away for free now, while your 10 competitors are not doing it, you will draw a lot of people simply because consumption is easier by comparison. If your 10 competitors also started giving away everything for free that advantage would be gone.

Of course, there might still be a net benefit, but the evidence we have should be taken with a grain of salt.
I'm not sure what switch you are referring to, they've been using HAProxy and Lucene for quite some time.

Also, what would a No SQL data store give them (for central data storage - not caching) that they aren't already handling with SQL? Keep in mind that they also have relatively easily partionable data (if necessary they can break off any StackExchange site and database to their own dedicated hardware).
What device would have been a better comparison for someone who cares about price?
My friend's cat managed to open an apartment style fridge, correctly identify a package of hot dog weiners, tear the package open and eat all 12 weiners. After that he didn't come out from under the bed for three days.
the defining feature of fiesta.cc (as opposed to posterous, etc) is that list names don't have to be unique - so anybody can make a new list called "family@fiesta.cc" without worrying about registering the name or running into collisions.

Right now messages aren't saved at all (for privacy reasons). In the future there will be optional (opt-in) archiving like yahoo/google groups has.
Case is it's a bad article by a frenetic journalist. Bad written and more biased than Jobs. His 90% "math" is ridiculous.
I stopped reading at "(DDoS =! Anonymous)". I can overlook the gross gramatical errors that permeate TechCrunch's writing, but transposed characters in pseudocode? Can't handle it.
No worries -- if you'd had contact information in your profile, I'd have emailed you. I hesitantly posted it here, but then immediately worried that somebody else might register it.

Glad it worked out!
Ask HN: Switching Tracks?
Hi, fellow hacker newsians -

I've been doing Java and Javascript development for about seven years now, and I feel like my learning curve is starting to flatten out. I have a bachelor's and master's degree in computer science, but life and a couple of other circumstances tied me to an enterprise job that has started to tail off in terms of technical challenges. When I've submitted my resume, it seems to be seized upon either by people who want a J2EE programmer (my Java experience) or a web developer (my Javascript and AJAX work) and frankly, there isn't much that interests me in either of those fields beyond a paycheck. When I was in grad school, I did a hell of a lot of coding in C++ on interesting problems (e.g. genetic algorithms, a database driver) just for my own sake, and I've even done some minor contract work that allowed me to use Python, but that gets pushed aside as "irrelevant" when I try to highlight it in an interview or cover letter.

What I'd like to do is to get a job doing something that's technically challenging. As I see it, that challenge could either come from new tools (e.g. a new language) or a new task. However, the problem is that as I've accumulated experience, people increasingly see me as a specialist in the Java code I've been writing, and my extracurricular and general qualifications seem to be discarded.

I'm curious how people have handled these sorts of switches before. Anyone have any stories or advice?
Did they ever say that? (The first part, not the second.)
To argue against this metric, I will use Reductio Ad Absurdum.

Look at the finished software. Count the characters in the source code. All of the source code, tests, comments, configuration files, whitespace, everything in the project's source.

Divide by five. That's the number of words. An average professional typist can type at 50-70 wpm. we're professionals, so we'll take sixty. Divide the number of words by sixty to get the number of minutes.

Perfect productivity for a professional-grade typist consists of spending that number of minutes typing out the finished software. Take the number of minutes actually logged by the entire team and divide by the perfect productivity number.

If the team took twenty times as long, they have a productivity of 5%. If it took 1,000 times as long, they have a productivity of 0.1%.

This is the same thing the author advocates, only I am suggesting that any activity except typing code that appears in the finished product is what the author calls a waste.

Something stinks here.
hm, whats with the other 10% if there are no other products?
Transactional memory is easier to work with. But as long as you have strong consistency guarantee, I doubt any significant performance boost will come with that.
Stop Sending I - ME - MY sales emails
Making Science & Technology Cooler Than Sports (w/ Dean Kamen and Neal Bascomb)
consumer sales?
Tell HN: Why the iPad may be invulnerable
First off, yes, I'm an Apple fan, but now they're the over dog, so I'm no longer interested in them for that reason.

I think all this discussion about iPad competition misses one huge point that no one has noticed: just watch the keynote and the whole GarageBank application demo in particular.

Is anyone ever going to build an application like this (think about its depth--probably man-years of work, partly based on existing Mac code, but clearly with a huge effort to make all the virtual instruments with their life-like controls and more) for Android? I really doubt it. Google wouldn't and probably can't. The hardware manufacturers are a joke. Somem third-party could, but would anyone invest the time required on a risky venture like this?

Couple this serious play tool, which every teenager with a shred of curiosity about music would want, with the serious work tools like Pages, Keynote and Numbers, and you begin to see that Apple's main advantage in the tablet wars (at least in the volume business) isn't hardware but their own software apps.

Yes, at some level, if you just want to browse the web and check your email, all tablets are equal. But what really fires people up are these serious work/play apps. Once you see them in person, you're hooked.

I seriously wonder if any iPad competitor really has a chance, no matter what their hardware offering. I'm not trolling, honestly, and it'd clearly be a bad thing if other pads can't compete. I just think people are missing the forest for the trees.
Data on a BB is routed through RIMs servers. BB users generally aren't charged data if the track is intra-RIM.

It's also compressed and encrypted.
hello, hn. i built a website where you can rate a human out of 5 stars and write a review of them. i remember reading an article here about who would win the war as the measure for a person's online reputation. would it be quora or stackoverflow, linkedin, twitter, etc.?

everyone here on hn recognizes, say, patio11. big burly dude, hairy chest, stalking the halls with his smoking hot cheerleader girlfriend. online reputation in the forms listed above can give a sense of how cool someone is and how nice their clothes are, but it doesn't provide much room for dissenting opinions and critique.

i built chattel.me as a reaction to high school, consensus, the level of online activity as a measure of worth, etc. on chattel.me, someone can say their piece about how great or horrible you are in spite of what the crowds have concluded. or it's like picking a restaurant via yelp -- above, say, 4 stars, a restaurant is game, but reviews can be read to determine kind apart from quality.

as far as i can tell, the internet is useful for two purposes: 1. to explore deviate sexual practices in greater detail; and 2. to rip each other the shreds anonymously. satre's famous quote is that "hell is other people", a reference to how the opinion of the other shapes the way you experience the self. i've aspired to create the "hell" on the internet.

and by hell i mean the livejournal to blogger or the myspace to facebook, where the foil to chattel.me is about.me/flavors.me, personal branding, and "beautiful design". the former are typically internet ghettos, but they're places of more raw human emotion where anything goes versus the superficiality of self-constructed narrative and advertisement. chattel.me is what some might call "hella emo".

i'm trying to speak to the nerds, rejects, losers, etc., what i was in high school and what i'm again on the high school that is the internet. nerd heros these days spend all day communicating with customers via social media, are highly popular, etc., which requires a degenerate level of engagement and polish. what happened?

fair’s fair, and i’ve added a page for myself here: http://www.chattel.me/humen/walter-chen-new-york-ny. i’ve already scoured my mental rolodex for who would merely think of me as “meh…” to no avail, and i’ve hit refresh a few times. i imagine that the site’s primary engagement mechanism will be neurosis and narcissism and it’s working fairly well on me.

i taught myself rails and did this. check it out, and give me your deepest thoughts.
if the programmer writes disciplined (data-race-free) programs

The idea seems to have merit, but such a phrase (staring with "if the programmer") also means that it will be diluted once it hits the programming mainstream. (Just a fact of life.)
Intel's Fortran compiler does this - they call it PGO (profile guided optimization) - you can instrument your code to generate a profile, which you then feed back into the compiler along with your code.
Video tutorials for the Coq proof assistant
Internet-on-your-TV startup Boxee raises $16.5M
Reminds me of a fun little post regarding Google:

http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2008/03/mr-googles-guid...

Fun quote from the post:

No (said Google). That's what I mean - you really don't understand. You see, I don't care if people come and look at these hen scratches or not. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. As long as I can sell a few advertisements on that page of my guidebook I really don't care. After all, what better praise for a Guidebook than to help people find out what's wrong with it? Just leave your manuscript with me. I'll look after it.

He held out his hand, imperious now. I felt disheveled after my long night. My brain was spinning. I could see no alternative. In a vain attempt to maintain some self-respect I drew myself up to my full height and pulled back my shoulders, adopting a bearing appropriate for my class. "All right Google. Here you go. Don't lose it now."

"Thank you sir. You can be sure I won't lose it. I never do lose anything you know."

I turned away from him and stumbled down the stairs. I had ended up giving him an order, and he had accepted it. Yet I could not shake the impression, even as he brought me a glass of sherry that evening in my sitting room, placing the silver tray beside me with deference, that Mr. Google - far from being a butler and travel guide - was more a master than a servant.
Apple reports the same shipped to stores numbers. Why not compare them?
I suspect this is more of a branding issue. Macbook Pro is a relatively memorable name; U36Jc took me longer to type than the rest of this sentence, let alone remember (I won't).

Apple is better at being the original-design-brand, even if they're not the only brand doing awesome original design.
I have thought for a while that some take on the Mixergy model would be an excellent way to distribute music.

If you don't know, about a year ago (?), Andrew Warner initiated a system wherein new interviews would always be free, but you would have to pay for archival content. This seems to be working for Mixergy, but I submit that it could be even better for a record label - it promotes long-term development of artists, using their work as its own promotional material, and adds incentives to maintain a working relationship. It also rewards fans the fans that are most likely to evangelize.
It's not just politically incorrect, it's also incorrect. Hong Kong was not setup as a place for the british to run, the british came in and controlled it. There's a difference - because the british were absolute law and order. There were not two voices.

A more apt comparison would be suzhou. Areas of it were developed under singaporean authority. The singaporeans ended there with huge losses, and I don't think they are interested in doing such anymore.

And singapore and china are relatively close culturally - if for example china were to setup cities in Africa, diaster would occur. You can see the same happening with current chinese ventures there: they are run and managed solely by chinese and employ chinese. I was watching a BBc documentary the other day about some chinese companies in Angola, and an Angolan man complained: "Why do they need to bring people from China here to drive trucks?" The answer is simple - if you have people from two different countries and two different cultures where one is driving a truck and the other is managing his work, then productivity will sink massively.

A country administering a town in another country will be constantly beset by these cross-cultural problems. There will be conflicting interests, conflicting cultures and conflicting work attitudes. One side will resent the other, and instead of new booming towns, there will be wastage and empty buildings.

The current system is better, where a country simply sends its people to build infrastructure and then walks away. Perhaps even build the entire physical infrstructure and buildings of a city, but the actual management has to be separate, I'd think.
Do you have a sense of how Redis fares in a similar test? I realize there are lots of differences, but I'd be interested in comparison with the same test set, both to see performance drop off as memory fills, and to compare efficiency of memory usage.
I've never heard of Opacity before but this looks pretty awesome. Anyone else used it for iOS or Mac apps and can weigh in on how well it works?
I'm quitting Hacker News
The styling of UPS delivery vans shares this longevity. I think it's because we all know Thinkpads just keep looking the same, so they never look out of date. Whereas, we can tell a Dell from 5 years ago is going to be a lot slower.
I don't expect research but at least do a search on Wisconsin Budget Deficit. That's what I did and I came up with this (http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/109275069.html)...

Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle's administration on Friday told Republican Governor-elect Scott Walker that he would have to cope with a $2.2 billion deficit in the state's upcoming two-year budget, but this brighter-than-expected forecast contained more than $1 billion in hidden pain.

To arrive at the favorable estimate, the Doyle administration's estimate assumed that Walker and lawmakers would make spending cuts that have yet to actually happen - two more years of state employee furloughs, no pay raises, a virtual hiring freeze and belt tightening in state health programs. Without that $1.1 billion in savings, the state's projected shortfall rises to $3.3 billion - a significant increase over previous estimates that put the gap at between $2.7 billion and $3.1 billion.

Even liberal blogger Ezra Klein backed off the claim you're making (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2011/02/wisconsi...)...

As I wrote in the update to my original post on Wisconsin, my initial understanding of the way Gov. Scott Walker's tax cuts had changed his state's budget picture was wrong: They didn't add to this year's deficit, but to the 2011-13 deficit. That doesn't make them any more fiscally responsible, but it does mean they're not behind the deterioration in Wisconsin's 2011 budget projections. They're behind part of the deterioration in their 2011-2013 budget projections.
I heard a small portion of this on the radio earlier today and I thought it was good enough to share. There are a lot of excellent points made.

I tuned in around 41:50 in the audio feed. Start listening there for some good points made by Dean Kamen.
> something which people voluntarily pay for

When was the last time you were forced to pay for something you didn't want?

I know that isn't what you meant, but if the producer of a good is not capable of determining the terms under which that good is sold/licensed, then you're still in effect talking about donations.

This has nothing to do with buttons: there's no aristocracy attempting to limit your access to that ebook or that piece of software. The creator set a price, and you're saying it should be perfectly fine for anyone to read that book or use that software for free, whether the creator agrees to that or not. "DIY" isn't pulling torrents, it would be producing the content or software you want to consume or use yourself.
There is no cheaper Xoom. There simply isn’t. The comparison is entirely valid.

Prices matter. Case in point: Apple has no competitive budget laptop. Their cheap plastic laptop costs $1,000 while competitors sell budget laptops for $500.

Sure, some spec might be minimally better here and there, that doesn’t change anything about the fact that those $500 laptops are perfectly competent and Apple has nothing to beat them.

(The only difference is that Apple explicitly doesn’t want to sell a budget laptop but the iPad’s competitors position themselves as, well, competitors.)
This reminds me of the short-lived HN Offers fiasco a few months ago...

Respectfully, HN is not the place to solicit for clients.
It includes Windows Mobile 6 phones. This is total user base share not quarterly market share. WP7 has much less than that.
I found a correlation: HN is a site full of hackers, and they upvoted it.

If you don't like it, downvote it, or don't read it.
That definition is age old and unprepared for the future. It does not determine what the word theft was intended to mean. In other languages, the definition of 'theft' is not that strictly restricted to physical property.
KA9Q taught me networking - I'm in!
I think the jury's still out on Diaspora. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for the time being. That's my polite and respectful way of saying yes to you here.

But it's the case in point. Diaspora raised what would otherwise have been VC or angel dollars. Kickstarter isn't the platform for that. It's a bootstrapping platform optimized for product sales.

The people who succeed on Kickstarter have a) finished or finishable products that b) can be sold via "donations" on Kickstarter. This is because the patrons/backers on Kickstarter are far more likely to fork over their $50 and receive something tangible in return than they are to donate $50 to support a dream.

I'm a big fan of the Kickstarter concept. Huge fan. But human nature dictates the limits and strengths of its use cases. Your audience on Kickstarter is consumers, not financiers. These are consumers who receive no equity or charitable tax deduction for their "donations," and who will thus "donate" primarily in exchange for privileged or early access to a cool product. Or maybe to get their names in the back of the book. Whatever. Point is, they want to buy something. Inevitably, then, it becomes a sales and marketing platform and not a venture capital platform.

It's theoretically possible that the next Apple would come out of Kickstarter, but not the next Facebook.
$50? That's so expensive. Why not 50 cents?

... You do realize that lots of people pay thousands of dollars for logos, right?
Salesforce.com looking for a "Innovation Developer"
Yup. And, if you're writing anything that talks to a database, use a parameterized statement (sometimes called a prepared statement) instead of just concatenating strings. You will blow it if you concatenate strings and that's what we call SQL injection.
Selling Piracy