skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This reminds me of my favorite conspiracy theory, The Lost Cosmonauts, which proposes that Yuri Gagarin was the first man to survive space travel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cosmonauts
You mean like posts about not following your passion? Or following the money? Or telling everyone to chill the fuck out? [0, 1, 2] Are you seriously complaining about sanctimonious blog posts?

A quick peek at your blog suggests Pot and Kettle are having a conversation right now.

[0] http://unicornfree.com/2011/dont-follow-your-passion/

[1] http://unicornfree.com/2011/follow-the-money/

[2] http://unicornfree.com/2011/dont-let-the-bastards-grind-you-...
Why oh why do you need your battery life displayed in your prompt? There are plenty of other places to display it.
PyCon 2011: Saturday Morning Lightning Talks
Yeah I remember fleeing to Kuro5hin for a while when it appeared Slashdot was first "degrading", back in the late 90's. I don't think K5 ever got really attractive enough for me to stick with them for very long. I then had a pretty long gap in my "uber-nerd website addiction feeding" department until I discovered HN.
I'm 19 - business/design (basically creating shit) is more important to me than uni. I've been too 3/4 lectures and no classes this term, and i don't regret it.

Just do it, you shouldn't even have to think about it, and find somebody just as ambitious, doing it on your own gets lonely.

Phase into it, even when im in a lecture im sketching something, you'll find out whats really important (your degree or creating your own company) to you as soon as you start.
Modern bath - BO-1680
This is one reason why Oracle is still the gold standard.
when entering hot backup mode, which is what you do during a snapshot, it logs the FULL BLOCKS that are changed. Failures and inconsistencies can be replayed from the archive logs.

Of course this means you can quickly blow out your log archival , so it's meant to be a transitory mode:
You should learn more about Wal-Mart. It is, profoundly, a technology company. Wal-Mart was one of the earliest adopters of satellite communications in the 1970s and are leading the RFID revolution today. They have used logistics technology to ramp up to heretofore unknown scale, and use that scale to batter their suppliers down on price.
Loading that page required an absurd number of HTTP requests for the amount of actual content.
Bahahaha. Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.
It's the most link-batish title I've seen in weeks. Adding date would be appropriate.
I'd be a lot more sympathetic to this argument if I thought the people "swinging for the fences" were really creating something of lasting human value. Maybe I'm in the minority on this, but it's not clear to me at all that things like Twitter and Facebook empower the man in the street nearly as much as they empower entrenched interests.

Just yesterday I was privately lamenting all the energy young people today are pouring into gimmicky, me-too social networks and into chasing dollars. I'd love to see that energy redirected into something more artistic and creative and, yes, personal.
Ask HN: Non-suave nerds?
When I started programming nerds were "nerds". Nowadays I can only find suave nerds. Where did the old ones go? I miss them.
Wow, the ones on HN are going to make a killing.
"his body turning molten on impact"

Perhaps everything else liquefied and was unrecognizable?
I doubt many people are reading that title as breaking news!
Ruby + OS X
Today I wanted to write some ruby. So I decided to install Ruby 1.9.2. But I realized that I do not have the developer tools installed because I just reinstall my mac. After that I realized that Apple will make me pay for developer tools (like make, gcc, etc...).

I know, I can use ruby 1.8.7 and download XCode 3 for free. But in the long term, what will happen?

Any other solution?
There are three ways you can use SSDs with ZFS. First, you can use SSDs in place of rotating rust. Second, as was previously mentioned, you can use an SSD as an extension of your filesystem cache. That's called Level-2 Adaptive Replacement Cache (L2ARC). You can also use an SSD as a logging disk to accelerate writes; that's called "Logzilla", IIRC.

In commercial offerings built around these features, you typically source an SSD that is either write-biased (logzilla) or read-biased, depending on what you are trying to do.
Reddit Is Down To One Developer
I'm more interested in ad-spam than this kind of botnet fraud spam.

For instance, if I built a twitter bot replying to anyone saying "iPad" with a link, then the page at the end of that link was absolutely filled with ads. How much money would I make?

It seems to be a somewhat viable method of getting some cash because you see a lot of those bots around.
I was fortunate enough to visit Star City while in Russia in 2004 or so. There is a statue of Yuri Gagarin there, and according to an engineer at the facility, it is a popular place to get married.

I don't have a hard time believing that either the USSR or the USA would have hidden space deaths if they or we could in order to build a national mythology.
PostgreSQL has this exact same feature.
Well, when I saw that title linked to npr.org my first though was that ISS return mission failed.
I hope he also has the number of unread emails in there.
> according to what I've seen [The American Red Cross] say on the subject, they have no direct connection to the Japanese Red Cross Society, and no current plans to provide funds or goods.

"The American Red Cross has contributed an initial $10 million to its main partner in the country - the Japanese Red Cross - to help with their medical and relief activities. As pledges are fulfilled and additional donations received, the American Red Cross plans to make additional commitments to help the people affected by the earthquake, tsunami and evolving nuclear emergency."

Cite: http://www.redcross.org/portal/site/en/menuitem.1a019a978f42...
Unfortunately, metagenomics is currently the lowest hanging fruit of genomics/biology right now. Sequencing has gotten exponentially cheaper to the point that these types of projects are feasible (the paper you cite is actually a proof of concept for their metagenomics pipeline), that everyone is just sequencing this shit out of everything. That said, there are quite a few pitfalls with this current approach:

1. Big data in biology is still lacking comparable analytical capability.

2. Most high throughput sequencing technologies (next gen sequencing) is using polymerase based technologies that have short reads. Polymerase (the basis of PCR) requires a primer to start the reaction - and the choice of primer can introduce non-trivial bias into the obtained results. Short reads are pretty good in dealing with most bacteria, but the reaction gets pretty hairy with hyperthermophiles (bacteria with regions high in GC content) and more complex eukaryotes (long stretches of repeated regions are difficult to resolve with the shotgun approach).

3. We will probably only see DNA reads that are slightly different from what we know to exist already. The generalization they make that 99% of species cannot be cultured with current methods is true - but an analogous scenario with DNA can be made. The sequencing reactions will probably be optimized for sequences with similar composition to what we already see. The task of extracting DNA from bulk material is not trivial - this can remove large swathes of species from view even if the sequencing is trivial. Complex 3D RNA and DNA structures such as hairpin loops and noncanonical pairing makes sequencing hard.

It's definitely still a difficult question to tackle, but more difficult than doing it are answering the questions "What can we learn from this?" and "What should we sequence?"
Indeed. Lying to your subjects about what the article is about is scummy as hell.
Toshiba Satellite A200 battery
In the specific case of a database server that actually has correct fsync semantics that the user has not disabled for some crazy performance reason, you are correct. However, there are many use cases that people want consistent snapshots across, like "apt-get install", that do not use a write barrier for every atomic-feeling operation.

(In fact, with a good database solution, like PostgreSQL, the RAID issue of the parent post is also solved: put your write-ahead or checkpoint logs on a single device, as its linear writes will easily swamp network I/O on an EBS, and use RAID only for backend storage, where you need random I/O.)
... but by then, you'd be forever bumped off the unlimited data plan.
"Being a startup" is not a binary condition. Startups possess many admirable traits and many big companies manage to capture some or many of these. And many startups have problems like politics or bureaucracy that you find in big companies. Saying that a startup is somehow conditioned on the number of employees you have is a naive definition of startup.

Clearly there are many big companies that have some of the burdens that come with that. And at the same time many big companies have managed to dominate industries for decades, make huge pivots, and innovate in new areas far better than startup competitors. IBM did a huge pivot in the 90s. Apple made a huge pivot in the late 90s. Xbox Kinect is actually some pretty amazing technology. Google building self driving cars is an amazing innovation.

To say that big companies can't be lead through big changes, can't be entrepreneurial, can't make pivots, can't bet their brand on one big vision/product/push, or any other trait we admire in startups is ignoring history and reality.
In one line: the classic dichotomy of opinion just degenerated into a vitriolic debate.

If only sanity prevailed, most commentators would probably dismiss this entire conversation with a "to each his own".

Dwell on the entire conversation for a couple of minutes, and it's immediately apparent that it smacks of religion. I'm ashamed to say a lot of individuals I have a tremendous deal of respect for, have dropped their guard in an unabashed attempt to proselytize the masses.

Yes, I get it. You feel strongly about it, and your unequivocal about how you feel. That's why it's called religion. Just don't shove it down other people's throats.

If there were ever an embodiment of Paul Buchheit's words "ADVICE = Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization", this would likely be it.
So Who Gets the Armrest?
Watching Star Wars via telnet... I've been looking for that command for ages.
Just one comment , the book is not new but from 1998 . This is just softcover release.
Digg really took off when two things happened:

1. Silverorange came on board and made a beautiful design.

2. We jumped all over this cool new thing called "Ajax," though really we were on it when it was still XMLHttpRequest.

Humbly, I think I deserve credit for 2 at digg. I didn't invent ajax, but I was kind of enthusiastic about it back in 2005, enough to make it work for us.
Apple Ipad 2 vs Ipad is it worth the upgrade
The Apple ipad 2 is finally here. Precisely what are a few of the major changes between the first Ipad and the brand new enhanced version launched in March 2011. Toward the bottm of the Write-up there is a movie outlining the changes between Ipad 2 vs ipad.
I forget where I learned this from, but the astronauts were also very likely to be unconscious very soon after the break up of the shuttle. They died when they hit the water, but they probably weren't conscious. Not that that makes it any better.
Hmm. I think you underestimate the effort that is spent on those two. RDS has really good replication which is really hard to configure and set up yourself. And having configured Hadoop I know it takes more than 5 minutes :) Perhaps Whirr makes that easier. Also, EMR's Hadoop is tuned to work really well with S3, which you don't get with stock Hadoop (or even with Cloudera's).
That reminds me of the first episode of Skeptoid I listened to: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4115
Part of the library is visual using jquery ui. I don't believe it would work on node unless breaking the ui layer into another library. Then would could have the crunching on nodejs and the ui on the browser.

A nice rest API could sit on top of node. Hummm
This makes me shiver in my boots. I couldn't imagine having to run that site myself. Neil is inline for a big pay raise.
That notion is covered by Adam Curtis in his "A is For Atom" film. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1860517361048002456...

Western and Soviet engineers that made nuclear power stations happen could not refuse because nuclear was the cultural mania of the day.
This is very accurate of many teams within Amazon. Also, I don't know the exact story of what is happening with EBS now, but I have heard an increasing number of horror stories about EBS.
Introduction to Node.js with its creator Ryan Dahl
I've seen good points on all sides of this debate. What I think hasn't been emphasized enough is that one goal/philosophy does not preclude the other. You can do both. For example, you can first aim to make a small exit, and/or a small recurring revenue from a lifestyle business, then, move on to try a larger exit, or add additional revenue streams. I do think the "let's go for a huge exit, and change the world!" on one's very first attempt, especialy if you come from humble financial background, or have significant financial dependents, is probably not wise, in the general case. You should crawl before you walk before you run. Plus if you are going to fail, don't let anybody kid you into thinking it's better to fail using millions of dollars of other people's money than to fail with just a few hundred of your own. It's nice to have the ability to quietly bury your mistakes. You still get the upside of learning from them, but with less of the downside.

Side note: Ack, just got bitten by the "Unknown or expired link" flaw with HN. Paul, man, what is with that? Bad user experience. Don't tase my flow, bro! :)
Geolibertarianism
The hiring market is very competitive right now. It is hard for Amazon (or anyone) to hire good engineers. I think this is exacerbated by Amazon's lack of perks. My opinion is that if Amazon wants to hire the best of the best to work on AWS products they need to stop being so cheap ("frugal") and match the perks (and pay) other software companies offer.
This Twitter list is auto generated using the YCPages directory: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2273898
Xobni (YC S06) comes to Gmail
Someday, probably around 2027, Google will once again become like a startup company. Whatever that even means. Many years after some new-new-competitor arises and steals Google, Facebook & everyone's users, revenue and hype, and after the ever shifting dunes of the industry's dynamics change notions and models of profitability, and well after these former titans of tech are delegated to subordinate roles under a new cohort of tech titans, then Google can be like a startup again.

Imagine that wondrous day when Google's annual revenues dip under $1 billion! Imagine when their global head count contracts to a mere 4k! Imagine the date when the last new Google Doodle appears on the homepage!

I wish Google luck in reaching their lofty goal to become a pale shadow of their current self.
The title is inaccurate here: they didn't add ads to the paid app, they added recommendations for other games made by the same company. The original title, with "ads" in quotes, is more appropriate.
Boy is this thread boring. I was about to write that it's like a thread about politics or religion: huge angry comments that teach one nothing. Then I realized why. The whole question of startups vs "lifestyle businesses," while a neutral topic for most people, is for many of the users of this site a matter of identity (http://paulgraham.com/identity.html).
really? I think that makes it significantly better.
Agreed. There's plenty of room in the world for both Alex and Amy's approaches to work, to be valuable, and to make people happy. They don't preclude or cancel out one another. It's all good.
What happens when the last one leaves?

Is Conde just going to run off to Elance or something?

I can't even find a jobs page on Reddit.

At least it's open source.
You will pay the lousy five bucks?

What, you don't have five bucks? Where did the at-least-$200 computer come from? Can't you get five bucks the same way?

The other obvious alternative is Linux. I'm told Ubuntu runs fine on your Mac hardware.
I like this part:

It seems that NASA's been willing to accept a fair amount of it, given the tragedies that have bedeviled our space program.

NASA has been terrible on this. Not because of how much risk they're willing to accept, and not because they don't do the work to understand it. They always know what the probability of failure is. But, historically at least, they haven't been honest and forthright in taking to the public about it. In the early '80s, before the Challenger accident, they would say—and this is where I think they actually lied, I don't think that's too strong a word—they would say, "Flying the shuttle is like flying a 727 to Disney World."

That's absurd. Not only are you more likely to get killed in the shuttle than in an airplane; you're more likely to get killed going up once in the shuttle than if you had flown combat missions for two years in Vietnam. That's a statistical fact, but NASA doesn't make it clear. They might tell the House [of Representatives] that there's a 1.5 percent failure rate, but most Americans don't understand what that means. I mean, 1.5, what is that? Is that a lot? You have to relate it to something that means something to somebody. Otherwise, people have the perception that space flight is safe, and when there's an accident, they're shocked. It's like, "We gotta stop flying." If we want to add additional safeguards because now we're feeling emotional about it, okay, we can do that. But if we're still meeting our design specs for loss, why would we stop flying?

I like this approach.
you have to pay to be able to compile software on the MAC??
Watch out for Flipkart.
The bit about the translation is misleading. I speak russian.

The audio is very fuzzy, but I think at the end he says something that roughly translates to "the former cosmonaut is dead"

Before that he says something about the people, I can't make out anything about heat or temperature. Apparently the people on the ground couldn't either, which is why you hear "mission control" asking him to repeat himself. I couldn't make out the word they asked him to repeat either.
You are not looking in the right place, or you have the most generous definition of suave in history.
Within the past year I discovered dig's +short parameter, which let me retire some scripts I had for parsing just the IPs out of dig's output. e.g.:

dig +short google.com
On worst case scenarios
OWC: Not All SSDs Are Created Equal: The Story Continues
"When we took the cover off of this third, direct from OCZ SSD, we found a ‘S’ stamped over Micron logo on all the flash devices (see the image to the left). This indicates the device is “off spec” product because it failed some parameter of Micron’s full performance and/or quality specification testing. “Off spec” memory is typically used in low-level applications such as toys, offering considerable cost savings over Tier 1 level to an SSD manufacturer."
Agreed.

1980: I know people that met at a local Young Republicans mixer.

1975: I know people that met at a disco and/or roller derby

50,000 BC: I know people that met in a cave.
You are right. I did not intend to mislead when submitting.
I am looking at my paid version of Angry Birds. It contains ads for Angry Birds plush toys, an original CD, and St. Patrick's Day cards, just to name a few items.
Since they're just ads for other things by Rovio (which, if I were a big Angry Birds fan, I'd personally be happy to see: I usually like to find out other stuff made by those who make stuff I like a lot), I wonder if they could've mitigated the backlash some by making it easy to choose not to see them again.

Anyway: convention is that paid apps don't have ads. That's tough to overcome, and everybody gets more pissed when the big guy seems like they're taking advantage of their position.
That not the point. The point is the tools are free/open. And what will happens when Apple will decide to make you pay 1000$ for software package?
They're still accurately called ads, though.
Some of them may have been conscious: "At least some of the astronauts were likely alive and briefly conscious after the breakup, as three of the four Personal Egress Air Packs (PEAPs) on the flight deck were found to have been activated. Investigators found their remaining unused air supply roughly consistent with the expected consumption during the 2 minute 45 second post-breakup trajectory."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disast...
Actually no. But IMO in a near future yes.
Unless they're working on new features which are needed tomorrow, one dev seems fine in the interim. The number of sysadmins is more important to keeping a site running, but of course that's not what's in TC's headline.
No, he's wrong and you were right - they are ads.
"Just Ship" t-shirt
The Unique Value of 1-on-1 Teaching
> That's really genius, pun intended

Sorry that this is off topic, but thank you for saying "pun intended". It sometimes saddens me when people try to cover up a perfectly good pun or act like they are above being amused by puns.
Just out of curiosity, what was the article supposed to be about?
Ironically, a month ago they were looking for devs and asking them to invest considerable time writing demo apps (front end engineers, for example, were tasked with writing an Javascript Reddit clone using HTML5 storage to keep track of votes, etc.) to prove their worth:

http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/fjgit/reddit_is_doubli...

My guess is this may have repelled some experienced devs that, otherwise, might have applied.
In theory, if they can get by temporarily with just one engineer then the site was engineered well to begin with. There's some good management lessons from "The Mythical Man-Month" being applied here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
Why does the tech community seem to be so liberal?
India is a big country. Are you referring to a particular city or region?
Goldman Sachs Programmer Sentenced to 8 Years in Prison for Code Theft
Dabble DB shutting down
I wish I took the leap and dropped out of college when I was attending. That's perhaps the biggest mistake I've made in my life. My best advice to you is that if you're a business guy and you're street-smart, drop out and pursue your dreams early. There's nothing comparable to learning while doing.
Good Luck..... I guess this sort of explains what's up with AdventNet and it's quirks too... all the good people left?
that really is an mvp
Yeah +short is pretty cash. I alias this[1] little magic glue to wiki and use that a lot instead of wasting precious milisecs on HTML and silly styling.

[1]: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/2829/query-wikipe...
I dont really follow what you're saying. Why do you think a 3 way handshake would make any difference here?
Why would it make bot-nets easier to find?
How to be a Consultant, a Freelancer, or an Independent Contractor [2009]
Ctrl+r instead of history | grep
He is, but he's only been there a couple months.
I'm still here.
Motivation, Part 2