skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know why you need to be rude and condescending. I don't know much about these things, but cursory research shows that these are at least good questions: http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep08244259.pdf

"It does deplete glucose" seems to be in question, doesn't it?
I'm pretty sure it would someone going out on the first weekend is really keen to get one, when you are already committed to spending $500-$600, a $100 up sell isn't going to be to hard on the part of the retailers.
PyCon 2011: Continuous deployment
Be very careful what you ask for. AT&T would be more than happy to implement a fully-tiered system like they do for cell minutes.

I'm not saying this is right, I'm just pointing out that this is far from the worst case scenario.
Apple attracts 70% new buyers with iPad 2 launch
[Jobs]: We want to build a 37signals out of India, hiring at Interviewstreet
I've been thinking about this idea actually. Sometimes, it'd be really handy to have blog posts (aka essays) under version control so you can edit them in your favorite text editor offline. At the same time, that could be very restricting; imagine if you were required to use git + text editor to edit/publish all of your posts.
The Oxford English Dictionary disagrees: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/77505?redirectedFrom=generaliz...
As I understand it, anything that gets vented from the outer structure first goes through an activated charcoal scrubber to remove radioactive contaminants. This may limit the rate at which gas can get vented.

Oxygen and hydrogen form explosive mixtures over a very wide range of relative concentrations, which doesn't help.
Unholy: _why's Ruby to Python compiler
1. Hey, no need to get upset. Like I said in my post I am just giving people my pov and people are free to ask around the city before they apply. I say that several times. Take a look and see what others say

2. It is not only because he is arrogant. That would be one thing, even acceptable if he was knowledgeable. He is incompetent and ignorant. He is wasting peoples time and is not helpful. Again I ask people to ask around.

3. Please note that there are 13 upvotes so far. Yet no comments besides mine. Nobody wants to say anything publicly because everybody is worried about their start-ups and reach. Nobody is going to flag this. Most people in the city who know will upvote this so that more people know.

4. To compare NYC Seed with Y combinator at any any any level is a joke beyond belief.
I had to reply because my wife watches more sports than I do as well. When the in-laws get together for things like the Super Bowl they let me hide in the basement to work. I'm definitely no good at actually playing sports, but I'd much rather do that than watch someone else play them.
From a technical standpoint, that's not all that far-fetched. AT&T is delivering to the last mile. The fiber runs to the node, which feeds households over VDSL (copper pairs). Each node serves hundreds of households, so if you happen to be on a node with one of these people that are eating 20% of the total bandwidth passing through that node, you may see the impact on your connection. There's only so much pipe.

This moves the argument up the chain a little bit. Why did AT&T implement fiber-to-the-node after they were given billions upon billions of tax breaks and subsidies? Verizon implemented fiber-to-the-premisis in some markets at least.
Disqus talked last year at DjangoCon also.

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/zeeg/djangocon-2010-scaling-disqus

Video: http://djangocon.blip.tv/file/4135225/

And the HN discussion item: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2249526
I'm in the same boat on this one. I got an Erlang book, read up everything I could on the -background- of the language (It's older than Java!) Got all mushy over the features and the promise of potential 99.99 uptime or whatever the statistic. This functional programming syntax is difficult, though. I'll probably play with something like Reia (Ruby syntax, Erlang vm) but I realize I'd still have to get a good handle on the Erlang language regardless. I really feel like it was an arbitrary design choice :\
If you are using debian my notes are on http://fr.blog.guylhem.net/2010/12/installer-etherpad.html
Hydrogen and oxygen only react at significant rate at high temperatures. In a hydrogen explosion, the rate initially starts off low, but as the reaction is highly exothermic, heat from the reaction increases the temperature and causes the reaction to accelerate until reactant concentrations are sufficiently depleted.

This means that hydrogen and oxygen can only react quickly if the concentration of hydrogen in a volume is high enough that the increase in temperature from the exothermic reaction is faster than the dissipation of heat, so the temperature will rapidly expand, causing an explosion. For this reason, hydrogen tends to build up and then explode, rather than burning continuously.

It might be possible to trap hydrogen in a small volume and burn it in a series of small explosions; however, I don't think the reactors are designed that way.
Wholesale Steam Showers
That's interesting. I have the 11" laptop as well. When I first got it, I thought it was too small, but it's so perfectly designed that I can be quite productive on it and don't need anything much larger.

The same can't be said for other designers of 11" laptops as yet. You really need a great trackpad to work with, because you do have to zoom in at times, and a great quality screen as well. The SSD helps tons as well. The MBA is the best designed 11" I've come across.
Hah! How old are you?

I'm 26. off by one!

I see the point of the quote.

I didn't mean what I said in the naive dismissive attitude that a reckless teenager might have.

I'm not talking about the difference between the lousy and the great. I'm talking about the difference between the good and the great.

I consider myself a good developer, in the sense that I'm not a lousy one. I don't see myself as a great/awesome hacker.

What I'm trying to get at, is that the difference is dedication and experience. Yea I didn't create the first ever 3D game, but I never had the required mathematical knowledge, never had much experience with 3D modeling, nor the dedication to go through with such a project.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure it's not admissible when the government obtains it without warrant and illegally. When evidence is revealed by someone else acting illegally, it's fair game for the government to use it.

Angelo Mozillo is free, though, so I'm not getting my hopes up.
Can you post the link? The USGS says 25,000 nukes would be needed to match the power of a 9.0 earthquake.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/faq/?faqID=33
Installing YamiPod on Linux: a multi-platform, very versatile iPod Manager
Turn your earbuds into speakers
They also just got acquired by match.com, so probably not happening.
Worth having in your Python Webapps Toolkit: uWSGI, Celery, Graphite...although not in this video but tornado & fabric seem great tools also. I'm discovering new python packages everyday. It's just awesome. :)
Earlier HN thread discussing where the rules come from:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2317467
The iPad was never meant to "kill" the laptop. From the very introduction, Jobs said it was to fill the role between the smartphone and the laptop. The iWork apps are consistently top sellers in the App Store. Apple didn't create iMovie and GarageBand because they are moving away from office apps, they made them because they already have office apps. So they didn't make an iPad 2 keyboard dock; it's probably because it wasn't a good seller. Most everyone I know uses the Bluetooth keyboard. I find it a bit of a leap that the missing keyboard dock means Apple is moving on from office apps.
Apparently ETag, but you know, with people actually using it, and a standardized hashing mechanism (to reduce duplication of common elements across sites).

(honestly I had never even heard of it before just now).
Isn't Bespin/Skywriter/Cloud 9 HTML5?
A musician tells his story of switching from Mac to Ubuntu
We've gotten to the point where damn near any article is argued to be relevant to Hacker News. Keep fighting the good fight... I'm with you in spirit.
I say this as someone who absolutely loves git and thinks it's the best thing to happen to VCSes in a long time: no it isn't. This kind of advocacy is worse than useless: when people realize that git isn't a revolutionary concept that will change computing and is really "just" a VCS (albeit a very good one), there will be a big backlash.
Show HN: Pilvinotes, your notes in the cloud
http://www.pilvinotes.com

This is my second rails app, which stores notes in plain text, supports markdown formatting, tagging, and full-text search of content.

What do you think? I'd love feedback on here as well as UserVoice voting via the "Feedback" link on the site.
Tectonic plates can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

Or something like that.
Ask HN: good places to find less experienced engineers?
Any suggestions on how to find engineers who are less far along the experience curve? We've done a good job finding very senior folks, but it feels like a mix would be better.

I guess the second question is how to evaluate more junior folks? It seems easier to figure out what you expect of a truly senior engineer...
There is. A kid left the frat and drowned in a river (it was a frat room not a dorm room). Drugs were suspected. I'm not sure why. They executed a warrant and took the money. BTW the autopsy found no drugs in the dead student's system.

Anyway, you make this sound so simple, just send a note and go to court. Most people are extremely intimidated by this stuff and they just want it to end. Especially when you've already been violated and had your reputation impugned. The advice they were given was it wasn't worth it.

Asset forfeiture is a serious problem.
http://www.aclu.org/blog/racial-justice/easy-money-civil-ass...

"In 80 percent of such cases, the owner is not charged. The standard of proof to be met by the authorities is the minimal "probable cause" standard. If the owner wishes to regain possession, he has the onus of proving in court that the property is "innocent"; his standard of proof is higher: a preponderance of the evidence. In some cases, property has been seized for acts someone other than the owner performed."
http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/pr-ma-hy.html

edit: I doubt they are doing this randomly, but they seem to be opportunistic and they do target certain types of people - youth, poor, minorities. The right to seize valuable assets is corrupting in nature. I think you'd see it drop dramatically if the government wasn't allowed to keep the assets as a fund raising mechanism.
I have a 32GB original iPad. If you want to be able to have all the pictures you can imagine having, but don't care too much about having your music collection there, then 32GB might be a good size. iPad form factor is great for photos. It's a bit big for a music player. This was my thinking.

Another reason: if you have a 32GB iPhone, then you could sync the same content subset with both devices, which might be easier to maintain than two sets of content for both.
PyCon Video Archive
Ask HN: How does Spotify do it?
I looked at Spotify today and It confuses me how they can allow anyone to play any song, anytime? What about licensing to the record companies?

What am I missing?

Are they paying licensing to the record companies or do they not have to since it is just streaming, not illegally copying the music like Lime or Napster?
I think it boils down to difficult to quantify factors: most notably, love. In spite of all of git's warts (or perhaps even because of them), it's very clear that git is a tool that was created by the people who would be stuck using it. I'm not saying that isn't true about the other ones. I'm just saying it just doesn't shine through as much.
He didn't make that claim. He claimed that the asset forfeiture laws are almost always used against "ordinary people," whom he distinguishes from "drug dealers/terrorists/etc."
Then my suggestion would be to tackle a real problem. It took me a while to know when Erlang was appropriate for what I as trying to tackle. About a year ago, I came across the need to regularly scrape websites from a list (pulled from a mysql DB) and get some very specific information from them (regex worked fine).

I first did it in Python (non-threaded) and for like five urls in the list it was acceptable. Then the list started growing and the system started bogging down a lot. I then thought to myself, "okay, well I should thread the python script then..." and that's when another thought kind of barged in and said, "uhm...Erlang would be perfect for this..." So I implemented it in Erlang - it was the perfect first production Erlang program.

I only had to do three things:

1. Query the DB and get the current list of URL's

2. Scrape the URL

3. Run my regex on the result and insert something in the DB

So, I did it non-parallel style first to get a grip. Worked great. Now how do I go and make this a parallel program? Two major issues presented themselves:

A) I want to (basically) map() the list of URL's from the DB and spawn a process per item in the list that handles the scraping and regexing of the item's URL. This was difficult for me but Armstrong's pmap examples in Programming Erlang helped a lot.

B) Handle proper locking with the DB. It was immediately apparent to me that doing DB calls from inside the spawn'ed proc was probably stupid and hard. So I decided the spawn'ed proc would only do the work of requesting the site and regexing the result - it then had to pass the result as a message back to a delegator (that handled all communication between the spawn'ed procs and the parent program) which would aggregate the results and insert into the DB once all of them had finished/failed.

So the pmap implementation not only had to split the list and pmap() on each item of the list, but had to also aggregate the results &c... It was complicated but so complicated I couldn't handle it. The whole thing took me about five days but holy god was it fast! I finally grok'ed Erlang too - I known now how amazing it is for programs that truly require parallel execution models and I also know how unproductive I would be trying to bend it to any project that didn't explicitly need that kind of paradigm.

[EDIT] It was complicated for me because I didn't want to just pmap() down the entire list, I wanted to only pmap() on a set of 10. So the list had to be split into ten, map the items, then break off another 10 &c...

The syntax is very familiar to me now after having written several other large production programs that we use (I can "read" Erlang) and it feels perfect for what Erlang is meant to do. I can't really imagine doing the same kind of thing so expressively in Python.
All browsers take advantage of it. Not very many library http clients do, though. (I had to write my own, https://github.com/paul/resourceful )
From anecdotal evidence from the Stockton Street Apple Store in SF (yes, I waited in line for one), they had a lot more 16 GB models than the others but sold out of them the quickest. There wasn't that much of a problem selling the higher end models either and eventually the only models they had left were 64GB Verizon.
You have ten more seconds of patience than me.
On the other hand, one could also attribute github's success to git's success. I suppose it's most likely symbiotic: github contributed to git's success and vice versa.
Wow, I know nothing about computers or hacker ethos, but the name "Hacker News" sounds scarily powerful.

Do we really want to keep these computer criminals up to date?
Funny, I did tempo-free stats when I was about 10 years old -- decades ago. Although I didn't have access to actual possessions, I tried to base it, best off I could off of field goals attempted for individuals and at the team level, and do various extrapolations.

Seems like it is still a fun area, with much better data now. I just need the time.
Insightful reporting on the scale of the problem from NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/asia/japan-fukushima...

The major issue seems to be that the power equipment is in a room that is flooded, so regular cooling is impossible. They're pumping in seawater, but they have to release pressure as it builds up and this released steam is irradiated. Until some kind of regular cooling system is rebuilt, this process to prevent meltdown will continue for the forseeable future.
Any amount of hydrogen vented into the outer building could be burned with environmental oxygen, regardless of how much of it available in the exhaust. Can't be that hard.
Why can't people use any dataset they want? I think the rule should be, "Use any data you like, but you must submit any data used for use by the rest of the field".
Skip Lists are Fascinating
Meditation does the trick..
Maybe I'm missing something, but does anyone have an explanation for the 28%(N)/32%(Y) response to "Did you have the first iPad?" at the launch of the first iPad?
Heroku was originally a cloud based ruby text-editor/IDE of sorts. I bet there are good reasons they didn't stick to that.
Hello from the East Bay, home of the Hayward Fault Line:

The last five major events were in 1315, 1470, 1630, 1725, and 1868, which have intervals of about 140 years (note that 2008 is 140 years from the major 1868 event).

If a major earthquake were to occur on the fault, damage would be catastrophic. More than 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars in property exists in the affected area, and more than 165 billion US dollars in damage would likely result if the 1868 quake were to recur.

The estimated probability of a major earthquake on the Hayward within the next thirty years was estimated at nearly 30 percent, compared to about 20 percent for the San Andreas Fault, which can have larger earthquakes but farther away from a significant portion of the urbanized parts of the Bay Area.

(various rips from Wikipedia)
The Great Tractorcade That Wasn't
You mean other than piratepad being an unstable hacker playground?
This was the intention. Around a month ago we started asking what data people would like to use. We incorporated some of that feedback to decide what data to use for this year.

If you have other suggestions, please let us know, and we'll add it for next year (if possible). The only thing we're trying to avoid is somebody coming in with a lot of data at the last minute, beyond the point when anybody else can realistically get it incorporated into their model.
What about engineers straight out of college? Or is that too junior?

Also, re: how to interview junior people. I'd say the one thing they don't have is experience, or to measure a senior engineer's abilities it makes sense to ask how many times have you built this <insert rocket ship> before, and what did you learn?

For a junior engineer, it is enough to test for willingness to learn, and aptitude for problem solving. Personally, I hate brain teasers and straight up algorithmic complexity type questions. But, given a real world system, asking them how they would build it is usually a good start. So, test for ability to understand big problems, break them down into smaller problems and then figure out a way to attack each small problem.

Curious about other people's interviewing ideas.
I only have 3 blog links on there. I would like to have more. Anybody got any links to share?
I have to assume you are joking?
Quicksilver is back?
It looks to me like Apple was trying to rush the iPad 2 onto the market before the flood of competing tablets later this year. Consider the limited stock at launch, the very short delay between the announcement and retail availability, and the fact that unlike most Apple launches they didn't clear the old model from the channel beforehand.
Figuring out the basic concepts they are familiar with might be a good start. If they have the capability to learn from other more experienced engineers.

Having the means to figure out what domain a challenge/problem is in would be another plus.

EDIT: Defining a Junior engineer might be a good place to start.
I'm having a hard time understanding the second point. I have never felt that my VCS prevented me from doing ANYTHING, even when I was forced to use completely shit systems like Visual Source Safe 6.0.

Are you saying that you wanted to build systems that integrated very tightly with version control, or that the difficulties you experienced with older version control tools prevented you from being more adventurous in your coding?
- Apple doesn't usually clear the channel beforehand

- "Limited stock" is relative. Clearly they sold as many as they made. If they made 500,000 would you call it limited stock still? 1,000,000? 2,000,000? You just don't know how many they made.
It's kinda sad that people have kinda forgotten about darcs (at least in the mainstream) which is still an interesting project despite some of its shortcomings (and one of the first good DVCSs). That said I still prefer git.
Actually that makes sense. I didn't realize that you did the request for data earlier. I may have to do this next year, if you're still doing it.
"The average time between magnitude 8 and larger Cascadia earthquakes is about 240 years."

The outliers on that graph make me extremely skeptical of an average[1]. Eyeballing it[2], the most common delta seems to be close to 300 years. Doesn't using the mode make the most sense here, from the perspective of highest-probability outcome?

[1] Should we just outlaw the average? Perhaps a real statistician can advise.

[2] Earthquakes:

-7800 -7200
-7100 -7000
-6750 -6500
-6200 -5800
-5500
-5150 -4800
-4450
-3900 -3800 -3750 -3500 -3300 -3100
-2800 -2500 -2400
-2200 -1900 -1600
-1500 -1200
-1100 -900 -800
-500 -300
-100 200
500 600
700 900
1200 1400
1500
1700

Deltas:

600 100 100 250 250 300 400 300 350 350 350 550 100 50 250 200 200 300 300
100 200 300 300 100 300 100 200 100 300 200 200 300 300 100 100 200 300 200
300 200

Frequency distribution of deltas:

50 1
100 9
200 9
250 3
300 12
350 3
400 1
550 1
600 1
It does not matter what you happen to think are good alternatives or are desirable, because those of us who live in the real world have to deal with "what is", not "what could/should be." For base electric load in the US you really have three options: nuclear, coal, gas. One produces a lot of radioactive toxic waste over the course of normal operations, one produces lots of CO2, and the other is nuclear.
When i was younger i used a clipboard as a prop to get though the back boor of concerts...check my clipboard while walking at a fast pace worked 90% of the time....
canvas is hardly what Poole is famous for.
> areas that were below sea-level before hand
Some areas became below sea-level _after_ the quake.
The land sank a maximum of 70cm.
This is off topic a bit, but it tells my story about building something on top of git.

Just several weeks before dropbox came out into light I have completed building a prototype of what came out to be a dropbox clone on top of git (in fact, I have had it working with mercurial and bazzar as well, I designed it to be platform independent) and thought I have in my bare hands a potential for a great startup (demos were working smoothly, auto syncing files between clients, web viewer, etc). It was a side project, which I used to work on late night and weekends, and I gained what I evaluate as great results with no much effort.

Yet, one morning, I was opening my browser, pointing, as usual, to HN and saw a post saying dropbox have raised this and that money from Sequoya Capital. I was eager to know what is this dropbox and what they do and was terribly shocked to find out they were actually doing the same shit I was in, but, for longer time, with more and smarter people and fundings.

Soon after, I dropped my project (BTW, it was named StoreAge), and yet could not use dropbox or hear anything about it for a very long time.

Today I am a happy dropbox user, and git user and waking up every morning wondering about what will be my next startup.