skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You should ask this question on Metafilter as well. However, some people already have:

http://ask.metafilter.com/71101/What-single-book-is-the-best...

http://ask.metafilter.com/52701/Philosophy-readings

http://ask.metafilter.com/26408/crash-course-in-modern-philo...

Overwhelmingly, with my approval, many suggest reading "The Problems of Philosophy" by Bertrand Russell. It's one of the most accessible and thought provoking books on philosophy I've read. This has already been suggested by someone in this thread with a link to the book (http://www.ditext.com/russell/russell.html).
Please tell, who cleans after coal powerplants which polute while in normal working mode?

http://nuclearfissionary.com/2010/06/09/energy-density-and-w...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is...
The 15 Greatest Tech Pivots Ever
Any technology that makes human interaction and even plain observation impossible in the event of failure is a bad thing.

To my mind, No One can be responsible for something that is impossible to control when things go bad. It is not that I don't trust engineers, but you can not compare profit vs. risk when you can not control risk.
Congratulations John and Khan Academy! Khan Academy, as I've said before, I think is one of the most important pieces of technology I've seen. I think maybe one day on par, in terms of impact, with the web itself. Great news.
What do I do as an administrator with regards to communication and guarantees of up-time when I communicate these concerns to my clients ?

Here is my take: The longer Rackspace waits on transition details, the more customers will leave. I will if I don't see a concrete plan of migration, and I realize that these things are not easy.
Does +/- karma persist after a comment is deleted? It seems to be becoming common practice to delete comments that are downvoted.
With most energy generation schemes, including nuclear, many costs and risks are externalized to a third party -- namely the taxpayer.

I'm not familiar enough with the methodology to dispute it's finding regarding deaths, but I'd argue that evaluating risks solely on the number of attributable deaths is not a full accounting of risk.

What is the economic and social impact of the 20 mile exclusion zone around Fukushima? You're looking at a handful of deaths, but many lives have been affected nonetheless. If my rooftop solar panel kills my family somehow, that is a personal tragedy, but the scope in terms of people affected is nothing like a rare, but catastrophic nuclear failure.
"Guy unknowingly live tweets the Osama raid in Abbottabad"

When I first saw this headline, I thought "Guy" referred to "Guy Kawasaki" :)
It's interesting to hear a first-hand account of the development phase. Of all the things that could cause a snag, you wouldn't think the brewing screen (essentially a fancy "please wait" screen) would be the one. It seems like there would be more pressing issues at hand, but perhaps I am severely over-estimating the complexity and difficulties in developing an iPhone app...
Thank you for making an awesome product in Slicehost.

You mention that "...control panels...are only ephemerally important..."

Many in this thread disagree. You can see it getting brought up over and over as a reason we loved Slicehost, and a reason we don't like other alternatives as much.

I won't get too deep into UX theory here, so I'll just say this: people who make apps: if you hear the same comments over and over from your customers, they might be on to something interesting.

I truly believe in the expression "listen to what your users do, not what they say." So i'm not gonna pretend every lil gripe we have about this is right. But there is definitely a pattern in this thread that Rackspace can learn from.

[update: so far i've counted 18 mentions of the phrase "control panel" in this thread. it, and all user experience, matters a lot.]
I think the general aversion to nuclear is explained in part by our tendency to overestimate the risk of rare, catastrophic events and underestimate the risk of everyday events. This is precisely why we tend to fear flying more than driving, although the latter is far more dangerous. Ezra Klein has a nice summary of this phenomenon today, "How We Get Risk Wrong":

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/how-we-g...
There are very few instances where I would condone illegal drug use but this would probably be one of those instances where it works.
Rackspace needs to talk about pricing before they lose more customers. I'm a Slicehost customer and my main concern is what the price difference will be. About to set up a Linode account...
You don't need to bet when you can just read.
The Hardest Part of Being a Writer (Parallels to tech)
This is perfect. The alignment of terrifically smart, talented and passionate people to come together for a worthy cause. Congrats and wish you the best.

With the recent startup boom, its sad to see some great talent spend time building little features or apps; just wish they could use their amazing talents to solve some really large problems..
Interesting analysis:
http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2010/10/whats-really-w...
It's definitely possible that I am completely wrong as I haven't done LSD, Coke, etc.

Then I have to ask, on what do you base your opinion?

Some people take drugs as enhancers; perhaps that's like your analogy (though I'd replace "wheelchair" with "bike" or "car").

Some people takes drugs as normalizers. For example, people who have insufficient levels of serotonin or dopamine and are prone to clinical depression. That's like someone with broken legs using a wheelchair. Or like a diabetic taking insulin.

It's hard for people to know quite where they stand. To the best of my knowledge there's no good way to determine if someone has low levels of dopamine. Judging people as if they are taking drugs for the sake of enhancement presumes that person isn't in fact trying to compensate for a deficiency.

Curious that some people dislike the idea of chemical enhancement but have no problem with mechanical enhancement.

If taking drugs is like riding a bike or driving a car (or even using a wheelchair) instead of walking, why don't people disparage bike riding, etc.? I mean, you could have travelled that same distance without it, right?

No one gets upset because someone rides a bike for the fun of it, but somehow taking drugs for the fun of it is suspect, something you have to (gasp) admit to.
That last sentence bothered me so much I downmodded the comment. Maybe I'm just overly touchy; I have kids.
How is that possible? Was it USB tethering or something?
He did move to Portland, however. "I live in Portland, Oregon. Before that, I lived in San Francisco. I grew up around Washington, DC." http://al3x.net/about.html
> I should note that I’ve made a personal decision to scale back some other aspects of my professional life. I’m no longer accepting any new speaking engagements...

It is very hard to leave/scale-back unfinished business or commitments but it is a very important step before starting something new and big. I know many creative people who have tons of projects and commitments that they can't bring themselves to leave and as a result, they never have enough time to concentrate fully on their next big things. I highly commend John for making the tough decision of leaving Mozilla and lots of personal projects so that he could do something big.
"Osama Dead - Censored Video Leaked" Facebook spam
New spam spreading in facebook. I have copied the content of the js file which is causing links to be posted to friends wall, and pages. someone please tell me what else happening in this js file.
I agree except for "Has the potential". It is making an improvement right now. It is hard to describe how it feels to watch my 9 year old pop off months worth of school tedium in one morning, moving up through long division into simple algebra equations. Or my 14 fill in gaps that had been confusing her for years. Comments like "oh, I get it now" or "that's not hard at all" are common.
The Internet is a communications network and a collection of accessible data (that is, facts and information). Facebook is a site on the Internet which aggregates and makes available relationships between people and organizations. If you want to spy, relationships and dependencies are at least as significant as facts. The Social Graph has information that is hard to deduce from documents using a search engine.
Would anyone be surprised if Apple did the same, for the same reasons? It's already a built-in option for Mobile Safari.

But if Apple did it, I think the response would be different.
Kinect plus iPhone used to create gaming prototype
Not if she pleads guilty.
A new tool is available - a web 2.0 name generator.
So, is it usable even when offline? How does it handles conflicts once it comes back online? The only mention I seem to find about mirroring is mirroring across multiple servers, but not client<->server (unless you run a server locally on the client too).
Very insightful analysis as to how quotes get mangled. I feel like the only thing "new" about this event is how quickly it happened. The retweeted quote is so in keeping with Dr. King's beliefs it is no surprise that so many people would attribute it to him. In contrast with the real quote, though, it is really clear just how much more eloquent a rhetorician Dr. King was. Every time I read (or reread) him, I'm blown away. In my mind, the saddest thing about this is that people who don't realize the quote isn't really a quote might walk away with the impression that he wasn't as amazing a writer as he was.
I don't use Slicehost anymore but I use their articles to setup any Linux machines. I am so dependent on these articles that I have saved an offline copy of these articles using HTTrack.
Think of it the other way around, their engineers didn't optimize any queries and they don't have a dba watching for table scans or nested loop joins. To the amateur crowd it looks like "wow optimization" but if you've been developing seriously for your career this should look like "you have a lot to learn".
Flowtown Founder Ethan Bloch talks about how he brings ideas to life
I was hoping something like this would eventually happen with node. This is interesting from a technical perspective, but I think even more so from a business one. Creating more of an overlap between the technology used on the server side with that of the client just makes it easier to find developers who can do both. Personally I'd love to see the term "front end developer" lose some steam.
USPS accidentally issues Vegas Statue of Liberty stamp
If prediction markets are efficient, an event with a contract trading at 4 out of 100 should occur 4% of the time. If it never occurred, the contract would be overpriced. A better test would be to take a bunch of contracts trading at low values today, and then check in the future to see how many actually happened.
Your point being? The article is from April of 2010 when he was with Twitter, in May he joined Bank Simple. The parent comment is about where he was working not where he was living and I pointed out the age of the article for that reason.
Sure it's a bad thing, but how can anyone possibly rationalize away the fact that coal plants kill more people than nuclear plants per kilowatt hour produced?

For every one person killed by nuclear plants, thousands die because of coal, and other kinds of power plants don't stack up well against nuclear either.
But your university gives you a flat fee for bandwidth, does it not? If so, then their incentive is to help you use less. A telco which offers per-GB rates would rather you use more.
Explaining a drug's effect to someone who's never done it is like describing red to a blind person. They're just not going to get it until they experience it for themselves.
I used to use PasswordSafe on the desktop with the file kept in Dropbox but there didn't seem to be an Android version that allowed writing to the phone so I switched to KeePass on the desktop and KeePassDroid on the phone. Unfortunately KeePassDroid doesn't work with the 2.x version of KeePass, so I have to use the old version on the desktop.
Facebook celebrates royal wedding by nuking 50 protest groups
The user who made that comment (and subsequently deleted it) was http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=anon1231213

As you can see, their karma is -2, but there are no comments on their profile. This would suggest that karma does persist after a comment is deleted.

...unless I'm missing something.
Funny comment, made me laugh. But it's not just the major discoveries that make science valuable. It is also the accumulation of many small discoveries that shape our knowledge/understanding of the world.

Thank god there are new intersting things left to discover.
After having used a Kindle 3 for a few months now, I've come to realize that there are certain things about it that a touchscreen would sort of ruin. It's a remarkably stress-free device. Some of the stress of using a tablet that an e-ink screen mitigates:

1. It's light and cheap enough that I'm much less afraid to drop it, both because it's light enough to more easily avoid dropping and because it's less likely to sustain damage from a drop and cheaper to replace if dropped and damaged.

2. I literally have never had to worry about charging it. I use Wordcycler to sync to Instapaper, which I guess means I have it plugged in often enough to have never had to explicitly charge it.

3. The non-touchscreen means I don't have to worry about accidentally touching the screen and causing an erroneous input. Which means I can hold it by the screen if that's most comfortable. Physical buttons mean that I know for sure when I've made an input.

Truth is, there's very little I would change about the hardware of this device.
I'm not laboring under a misconception. I know how to do all of those things, I was doing them, it's just easier not to.

The example that comes to mind is making a change to a stored procedure's signature. In order to change it, you have to change all of the clients that talk to it at the exact same time. As a result, incremental rollouts become impossible, so you wind up doing high-risk huge-scale deployments or doing things like creating procedures named EntityInsertV2 and EntityInsertV3 or adding optional parameters with defaults or ignoring parameters that the procedure no longer needs but older clients still want to provide.

And then there's cleanup. As you really should remove EntityInsertV1 once all of the clients are using EntityInsertV2, but you can't have that in the same Update SQL, so there's really two deployments for every deployment.

If there's an easy fix for this problem (other than keeping procedural logic out of the persistence layer) I never found it.
Computer Hacker Tampers with Euthanize Equipment
That's a valid argument, but this thread is all about human safety.
How ironic that it was Penn Jillette, debunker extraordinaire, who ended up spreading the false quote.
Rackspace is investing heavily into the cloud. The Cloudkick acquisition was part of that. I am extremely happy to hear that the CP was one of your major pain points, because it is one of (if not the top) priority to improve. The team that is based in San Francisco is working directly on that project. If these sorts of problems are interesting to you, please let me know!
Note to self: tread lightly when commenting on the "community" Hacker News. The parent topic was about moving away from SF. Sincere apologies if my simple clarification torqued your jaw.
So I had to try it on my machine with 4 GB RAM.

For context, I already had opened Thunderbird, Sunbird, IRC, Skype, Pidgin, a twitter client, Audacious, an OpenOffice document and a spreadsheet, GIMP with 4 large and scribbled on photos, and a good number of terms and gvims.

Then I opened Chrome 11. And started opening tabs. After opening 101 tabs (really) spanning 3 windows, I gave up. I had it down to 110 MB physical RAM remaining, but it was slow going. These were real web content tabs of all different pages, not empty tabs. The system in general was still completely responsive, though Chrome was taking about 0.5 seconds to switch tabs as opposed to the normally instantaneous response.

So... whether Chrome 11 is a hog really seems to be somewhat system dependent. I do grant it's a significant download compared to the other browsers.

I'm going to go out on a limb and speculate that Safari uses more native Apple libs than Chrome, and those libs are resident already for the most part. This might account for your differences.
It took a lot of model updates to the mini to get upgradeable RAM.
You say that like having CRUD sprocs sitting around is a good thing.
You are correct in that local storage is wiped when instances terminate. Micro instances don't have local instance storage, only EBS. :)
Rackspace has excellent 1 on 1 support with livechat.
The #1 defining characteristic of entrepreneurs
KISS and YAGNI (2004)
It's probably important that this was a conscious organism. Although the shock factor would be higher if a tree had been jailed.

And "stolen" is much too strong a word. Let's say "illicitly obtained".

And it wasn't the "use", it was the excessive use.

And there was a fine also, so you can't just leave it at "jail". That sounds judgmental, anyway. Call it "corrective action".

OK, now what have we got?

"Excessive use of illicitly obtained 3G card by conscious organism garners heavy corrective actions"

Ahh, much better. No one can possibly be offended by that. Right?
I did some studies of different cloud provider's performance 1.5 years ago and Linode won by a wide margin: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison/

I ran some quick checks on Rackpace a few months ago and with the little data I gathered Linode still seemed quite more performant in synthetic and application benchmarks.
4 months wireless internet access != priceless stradivarius.
Artificial scarcity fail.

The problem here is Telstra and/or the power company for not securing their SIM card or account.

At the very least this "Mr. Freeman" should be involved in the case as he removed the SIM card, which is probably a violation in and of itself.
I hated the "PLS LET ME REViEW YOUR APP GOOD IF YOU GIVE ME CODE" emails you get all the time, and the inflated ratings by those who used them.

Good move.
"I prefer meditation's failure mode, which is no experience, to that of drug use, which is negative experience."

You can actually develop 'meditation sickness', which is essentially psychosis brought on from either excessive meditation or else meditation the wrong way. It's not super common, but it's still generally advised that people not take up a meditation practice without expert supervision.
Developer-Centric Takeaways from Ben Franklin
As I've understood it, it's already (partially) reverse-engineered by dropship. https://github.com/driverdan/dropship/blob/master/dropbox/me...

Still, I see no reason to use Droxbox servers when you could setup your own.
> coal plants kill more people than nuclear plants per kilowatt hour produced

Not to be picky, but we are seeing some of the first aging nuclear facilities being operated beyond their designed lifetime by people who don't deserve to be qualified as competent. Coal has killed more people than nuclear, but it certainly seems nuclear power operators are well prepared to close that gap. :-/

I worry about future failures as those reactors grow old.

Having said that, it would be much wiser to build more modern, resilient, nuclear power plants than the equivalent capacity in coal.
Sure. Just pay me the several billion dollars earmarked to design, construct and manage secure long term storage facilities and I'll deal with it.
.NET programmer probably isn't aware SQLite exists.
Let me explain why this is incredibly annoying for a long term (read: selfish) customer.

I have a ton of apps running on my old slices. A client pays monthly for the one slice and it really doesn't look like it will cover costs with the shift to their 'cloud' servers. I really don't want to have to go and reconfigure several versions of python and django and several apps. I don't want to migrate databases. I don't want to move various processes that have been running without being touched for 3-5 years.

The email doesn't give us any indication of the migration path. I don't care about your IPv6 problems or your OpenStack announcements.

Even something like domains hasn't been addressed. I use the slicehost interface to manage a dozen or so domains and their subdomains. Am I going to have to shift nameservers and reconfigure these domains?

Read their initial announcement to gain some perspective on how the acquisition was described.

"Our number one goal is to continue delivering the Slicehost experience. In fact, we hope to make it even better." http://www.slicehost.com/rackspace
There's nothing ironic about a skeptic being wrong if he admits his mistake when presented with evidence to the contrary. (Which Penn Jillette did.)
I agree that it doesn't matter, but it's entirely conventional for "Man" / "Woman" to be used in news story headlines, so your charges of sexism are silly.

On this topic, a fantastic satirical article by Hofstadter about uses of gendered pronouns: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
Winning Your First Freelance Job: How I Got Started
That's a problem -- engineers are frequently frustrated with the public perception of nuclear because they focus on a single metric which is just one of many considerations.
Simple reproduce case:

<html>
<head>
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.6.min.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<script>
$('body').append(
'<span></span>',
'<span></span>',
'<span></span>'
)
</script>
</body>
</html>

The bug is in this block: https://github.com/jquery/jquery/blob/1.6/src/manipulation.j...

Note the inner loop is clobbering the outer loop's "i" variable.