skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You think it just never occurred to libertarians to wonder what would happen if their philosophy were implemented?

I'm not talking about reason, I'm talking about historical precedent. Many theories about how a anarchistic system can maintain stasis but none of them have real life examples.

Why are you assuming that there should be a single monopolistic provider of these freedom-for-safety exchanges?

the problem is that when it comes to the application of force, competition isn't as efficient as a monopoly is. And I think you're confusing my definition of government. The government is whatever entity has a legal right to exercise force over some population. If that is the library, then the library is the government. In a real life capitalist republic, government competition turns into the two party system we have now, where each side is nominally for pushing the social contract farther left or right.

And are you deliberately confusing anarcho-capitalism (which Rand abhored) with Objectivism (which calls for governments to maintain police and the military)?

I agree with this aspect of Objectivism, the government's role is to provide for the security of economic exchange (enforcement of contracts, military security, courts).

that we should give that stuff up in a no-bid contract without question.

The question to me is not a moral one but an engineering one. Is there any reasonable path from where we are now to a responsible, efficient and effective government?
Interesting, but not comparable.
Perhaps she was referring to a fast, temporary location in which the VC name resides in memory, in which case she would be correct.
I agree.

The first block like that is a link, and the other three are not - it's not very consistent.

I'd recommend making the rest into links too.

It's easier to hit a block like that, instead of a much smaller text link to whatever the block is already advertising!
I'm talking about historical precedent

If you're talking about history, are you talking about how powerful central governments are worth all those millions of brutal murders? So far, corporations have killed far fewer people than governments have, and when corporations do kill, it's generally with the help of the state. Not an indictment of the moral character of statists, just how things work when you monopolize force.

the problem is that when it comes to the application of force, competition isn't as efficient as a monopoly is.

That sounds wildly unlikely. What is special about force that makes it different? And even if force is different, is it worth the cost -- the government that starts out by providing defense and law enforcement relentlessly expands into moralistic regulation, redistributive taxation, and intrusive snooping into citizens' lives. The most successful non-revolutionary conservative movements succeed in slowing this down, temporarily.

The question to me is not a moral one but an engineering one. Is there any reasonable path from where we are now to a responsible, efficient and effective government?

Likewise. But if we're talking about engineering good outcomes, the thing to look at his how to engineer the state away, not how to engineer around the problems that afflict all states.
Sucks when a singing girl is picked over you.
"The software uses the ipod’s built-in gyroscope to calculate rotation on the y-axis, so we can look around the environment around by turning the device, there are also controls for manual rotation with a slider on the left hand side of the screen."

Cool, but the iPhone doesn't have a gyroscope, only an accelerometer. How does it detect rotations that are perpendicular to gravity?
How did you manage that, how many times per day do you sleep?

How did you change your diet? I like the side-effects :)
Times haven't changed that much for people whose startup is not aimed at the tech-savvy crowd. Ours being primarily sports-related, blogs are simply not where our potential userbase are reading.
This isn't just a-typical it's dangerous. They are trying to be something they are not.

Mac vs PC is not a symmetric fight.

If apple wins 1% of windows users, its a big win (somewhere around 10% increase in sales). But it doesn't work both ways. If windows 'steals' 25% of mac users, it's less then a 2% increase in windows sales. (& reaching those markets with airtime costs the same)

Windows could have beaten that just by reducing replacement time by a few months.

Going after Apple's (tiny) market, with their hands tied (Vista isn't fun) for meagre rewards isn't smart.
No distraction is nice. I wonder though what impressions my customers have if they get emails from me at 5am...

My problem with going to bed at 4am-6am is that it's usually quite hard to get a good midnight snack. At least where I live and going into the kitchen is no option because I'd wake up my whole family. I usually end up eating a powerbar or cereal which probably isn't the best.
Please don't take her up on her offer PG! I get a really creepy teen drama vibe about her.
The phrase "password sharing" was half-serious (and apparently not very effective) view bait--I wouldn't call it that on the public site. :-)

Some reasons multiple superusers aren't enough:

* Superusers can disable or delete each other. Most parties won't need access very often so might not know until it's too late. In many client/consultant relationships you trust, but you verify. (The importance of the login-testing daemon.)

* Being reliably alerted when someone has logged on ranges from difficult to impossible in most systems. For backup/emergency type people, you trust them enough to make it possible for them to have access, but you'd really want to know if they ever used it when you weren't expecting. (And superusers can forge logs.)

* Many systems (like shared hosting accounts) actually don't allow for multiple super-users.

* Independent consultants/free-lancers need an answer to the "what happens if you get hit by a bus/are on vacation/have a power outage" question. 2-4 person federations of independents providing backup service for each other is currently impractical when each has several systems to access. It's bad enough that I have N logins of my own I have to keep track of--having to keep up with a further 2-3N logins (that I have to change periodically if I'm doing right) is way too much overhead. The only current workaround I know of is having the same password for everything, which is extremely poor security.

An important use I didn't consider at first is personal password escrow--making a way for my various accounts to be accessed in case of personal emergency.
I didn't see a license that these were released under.

It could be useful to put these onto a wiki and allow people to mark them up with comments about any changes they made to them through the course of their own use.
The killer concept to grok with divide-and-conquer is that it's only powerful if

1) the smaller version of the problem is actually
easier to solve and not just smaller
- or -
2) the smaller version of the problem is just as
hard to solve, but you can combine smaller versions into
a bigger one with less work than doing the bigger itself.

Quicksort is an example of the former (partitioning a list of size 2 or less is sorting it, even though partition is linear time). Merge sort is too (combining two sorted lists is linear time). Repeated squaring is an example of the latter, as is the Strassen matrix multiplication.

I took this class, and it took me a lot of just sitting around pondering before I got that stuff.
already being investigated: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/olympics/article45831...
C++ is constantly pushing frontiers and if you're on the bleeding edge, it can be jarring. I just read responses similar to these on Slashdot about the latest release of the boost libraries. Boost is undoubtedly a spicy meatball, but there are some really simple things it does that make my life much easier. boost::shared_ptr and boost::bind alone make C++ a much better language. So why the hate?

Likewise when I see the new features in C++ I take what I can immediately understand and slowly grow into the things I don't. For example the 'auto' feature as really awesome and simple. It alone will save me many lines of code tedious code (and many more avoiding said tedious code.)

I guess I can just be happy knowing that I'll never be fluent in C++. I'll probably never understand how: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_35_0/boost/bind.hpp works. But it doesn't mean I can't use it. Maybe one day I'll get into template meta-programming or maybe I'll forever gape like a tourist at the wonders the library creators bring forth.

The good thing about all these features is you don't have to use them all at once, and for situations where you want to evolve, there's always room ahead. I think for some language zealots, the expanse of the C++ frontier is somehow threatening. It's a bit like saying, I don't understand calculus so I won't use multiplication.
The last topic covered in this lecture is VLSI (Very large Scale Integration) layout problem: given a number of various electronic gates an chips, how to position them on the circuit board.

You may want to state the objective here as well. I haven't seen the lecture, but from the still on the google video I presume it is "... how to position them to minimize area".
Woz urges engineers to follow their hearts
7 Tips to Launching a Successful Web Television Series
"... I apologize. I didn't mean to assume anything. I used the fact that this user has made 1 comment over a year ago and had only 2 karma from that one ..."

Don't appologise - there is nothing wrong with your comment. I was just pointing there is an existing user that made it. I didn't want to name them w/o being sure.
Three Dimensional Images in the Air
Web browser to get 'privacy mode'
Miguel de Icaza: SecondLife rolls out Mono-powered servers
Adding a # to the end of the URL to circumvent the dupe filter is kind of cheap, if you ask me. Especially since the story that's already been posted about this is currently #3 on the front page.
None in particular. I don't think they need to be. They're not the sort of thing the user publishes, like an image; nor is there any plan (for now at least) to incorporate changes contributed by other people, as one would with software.
More Tweetable (shell) Scripts
"... The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. ..."

Code sharp, not pretty?
He's just rejiggering the words so that he has a good title. He could have just as easily said "don't steal a design -- copy it" and defined the words backwards, and the article would have worked equally well.

The concept is fine, but the wording is poor.
Yeah, I call hoax... Physics-wise this doesn't make sense

http://tinyurl.com/yqh6zq

TUAW confirms that, if you set the iPhone on a tabletop, the iPhone returns 3 values:

- X: rotation around the short axis

- Y: rotation around the long axis

- Z: whether phone is face up or face down

I don't think this is possible... unless that table was actually at a 45 degree angle or something?
This article explains some practical differences but misses out on the really useful stuff: how can you tell the difference before you hire the software engineer.
"I launched the site yesterday. Please pay $20 for it" = fail
where is 23:00? Having kids kind of keeps you regular.
What it's like to work at Xobni (interview)
You've lost me, festivusr.

It's not an exact recipe to follow. This we can agree on. We don't need recipes.

The quote I think you're looking for is "That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. "

Which tells me exactly diddly-squat. In fact, there are times that the things on the right are critically important; vital pieces without which the project will surely fail. How much more value could you put on something than that?

How about "Working software over comprehensive documentation"? Ever work on a project at the PMO level? How about doing a build-buy decision? Or perhaps splitting up a couple billion in work into small pieces for vendors to bid on? There are a zillion ways working software is a bullshit way to value anything. Working software is great. But it's not the opposite of documentation. For each bit less of documentation, you don't get a little more working software. The topics are not opposites and inversely proportional to each other.

You want to start a marketing campaign? Sell a lot of books, do a lot of public speaking engagments, all of that? Then come out with something like "Contract with America" or "The Agile Manifesto" or "The Swedish Bikini Team" -- anything that gets your point across easily and memorably. The Manifesto does that.

So now that you've bought the freaking cereal, it's time to put away the box and actually get to eating the dang stuff. And guess what? All of that sales stuff on the box? It's just sales stuff. The real stuff requires you to think and participate, not have happy feelings about the great revolution you're part of.

I've ranted enough. Seem like a nice person fest. Have fun with the manifesto and don't listen to any of those books or coaches. Probably just confuse you anyway.

I'm done.
none of the above
Meh, the bell curve has spoken.
How long do those last?
Suggestion:

Alert box/modal window/whatever:
"This will discard the information you entered in [xxx]. Continue?" a la Safari's "Are you sure you want to reload this page? You have entered text on ... If you reload the page, your changes will be lost ... reload anyway?".
I'm loving these interviews, keep them coming :)
This article has a great timing. I just announced my side project on my blog - http://bit.ly/U3AsK. It's called siliconverge.com - Digg for Semiconductor industries.

BTW, article was a great read, though was very lengthy! Very inspiring!
Oops, sure, how to minimize area. I had these words in mind when I was writing the post. Fixed now. Thanks! :)
Isn't what happens when we're dealing with collections relevant to the user in the current session where a lot of the meat of an application is? Isn't that a major place where the rubber meets the road?

REST is dandy. But I'd like to have an equally simple and elegant framework for dealing with heterogeneous collections over high latency networks.
I really hope that, in 2018, I'll be able to write low-level code in a new and cooler language. It'll probably be a Lisp. :)

what you really meant to say is that you hope not to write in any language in 2018
Well, he does make one good point in that each student should learn to "know thyself".

However, the rest sounds like he's trying to rationalize his perceived inadequacy relative to his students' potential.

Instead of becoming a luddite, he should realize that classrooms have changed: we don't need to be in the same "broadcast domain" to disseminate information anymore, push those lectures into PDFs they can read outside of class; use the face-time in class to pose questions for the group to solve/discuss; take more class time to answer questions students have (or add a digg-style interface to students questions before class so that the questions important to the students get discussed; etc.

Technology bridges gaps that this guy just wants to widen....
Faviki uses Zemanta API to suggest semantic Wikipedia tags
I believe the table is on a small incline (i.e. it's not perfectly horizontal). If you think about it, it's pretty hard to find a table that's perfectly leveled anyway. I have no idea how sensitive the accelerometer truly is so it could be a hoax (but probably it is not).
Have you seen this?

"Building a Hacker Space"
http://imakethings.com/Hacker-Space-Design-Patterns.pdf

.. this is something I'd absolutely love to set up.
How does the design of your site work? Can you persist the data into the pages that they navigate to?
Exactly! I am working on a small Asterisk framework, although Adhearsion does an excellent job, and my own little hack will never be useful; BUT IT IS INTERESTING!

And way better than writing yet another blog in Rails or Sinatra or something. Skip bulding on top of frameworks and get to the ground level.

Next up is a curses-based music player. It's cool to get dirty now and then.
I think you fail to understand the difference between morals and arbitrary distinctions.
EBay Is Slowly Losing Its Soul
I am very often up until 4am or so... but I'm not a hacker -- I'm a blogger.
"I'm not trying to beat up on incubators, but most of the entrepreneurs I respect the most would argue they were better off putting off raising money for as long as possible."

That's not Max Levchin's philosophy, whom presumably she respects. He raised $8m for Slide before they even launched anything.
I had to vote for 'none of the above', since I often stay awake until 26:00 -- I find that if I work 18 hours and sleep 8 hours out of every 26 hours, I can get far more work done.
I voted for 06:00.

But then, I don't get up until 2pm, because my partner works the late shift (Because it's quieter!).
Breath-taking images. Following the tune of another post today: I want to steal them.
Very cool. While the long-term storage aspect itself is really interesting, I'm more intrigued by the different ideas for how to preserve human communication for future and/or extraterrestrial civilizations that have no direct contact with current languages. (Regardless of what you think of aliens -- how would you communicate?)

* http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_SETI
I'm actually in the process of reducing the amount of sleep I get. For most my life, I've lived by an 8-9 hours/night schedule. This summer, however, I took a behavioural neuroscience course and one of the things I've learnt is that most people can reduce their sleep down to 4.5-5.5 hours with only minor side effects.

After starting this experiment about 2 weeks ago, I'm down to 6.5 hours now with no side effects. So far so good.
Thanks for your insightful comment! Can I use it in my post? (full credit to you)
SQS got a lot cheaper, I think around Feb this year. Are you sure you aren't going by the old prices? I find it very affordable now.

$0.01 per 10,000 requests
$0.100 per GB in
$0.170 per GB out (less with higher volume).

I can't remember exactly, but I think it was only a per request cost before of around $0.10 per 1,000 or something.

Also the in/out costs don't apply when they're coming from EC2, which would be the case in your scenario I believe. So from EC2 if you're doing an EC2 based distributed system, you're looking at one dollar per million requests (so for processing a message in a distributed system typically one dollar per 500,000 messages pushed then pulled).

Pretty cheap by my standards. Much cheaper than it was at initial launch.
The author's literary style may be overzealous but I thought his philosophy was at least credible. He echoes Tolle, Zittrain and others who warn (as Zittrain puts it) "the internet, in many important respects, is a collective hallucination." Consider how many people today will spend most of their waking life sitting stationary, staring directly at a display. Is that a rational, enlightened way to live given the opportunity cost? I don't know but debating the question as this professor is doing doesn't seem to me horrible or baiting.
It's unacceptable to the poster because they don't want to have to deal with the realities of computing infrastructure. They want a turn-key, no-hassle, no-think solution.

Which is fine to want.

The EBS failure rate is 0.1-0.5% annually. That's awesome. At 0.1%, the disk is likely (mean time to failure) to fail in 500 years on average. At 0.5%, it is likely to fail in 100 years on average. At either point, I'm more than comfortable. I can snapshot the drive daily/weekly/monthly and when you combine the snapshots as a backup with the likelyhood of failure in any given year being so low, I can rest easy.

Compare that with commercial drives which are likely to fail in a decade give or take. . . Well, I know where I'd rather have my data.

Getting back to the original poster, (s)he wants a system that takes care of the snapshots without intervention. So, package up EBS along with auto-snapshotting with an SLA saying that you won't loose more than a day of data and you have a business. You charge a premium because unlike EBS, you're reliable. All the while, you are just EBS with S3 - something that the individual could do themselves. EBS is unlikely to ever fail for your clients since I'm guessing no one is going to have a client for 100 years and even if that happens, you just restore one of the daily snapshots. Nice! You've lived up to your SLA while getting paid!

Think about it, the backups aren't where the cost is. 1000 PUT requests with 4MB chunks means 4GB is backed up for a penny there in terms of the number of requests. Data transfer from EC2 to S3 is free. So, those aren't the costs. As long as you can consolidate the delta backups so you aren't storing a version for every day since inception, I don't see why this service couldn't be offered for 2x the cost of EBS.
seems like the image would lag behind the rotation of the iphone a bit.
The Root of All Evil - Psychosomatic Rants
Corporations don't kill people because they are not legally allowed to. Give them the legal ability to kill people and they will (your example actually supports this, it's when the corporations collude with the government and have a chance of getting away with murder that they do).

you seem to be under the mistaken impression that I am pro government. I'm not. Bad government is responsible for more death than every other problem that faces humans. But I'm also a realist, as you say even the most successful of revolutions has only ever slowed government down. If I had my way the politicians would be dragged from their beds and shot tonight, but the world is not built for people like you and I. As long as intelligent people are a minority we have to engineer around the problems of government because whether you or I like it government is here to stay.
Many of the discussed items are testable. For example: show someone a known piece of bad/ugly code, and ask them to evaluate its quality.

Nobody does this, and they should. The hard part is standing back, and letting the candidates hang themselves.
Depends i'd say 2:00
Can you share a link or describe this a bit?
Even if this were true, and it's very not, the windows software stack would cause that hardware to run at 1/4 the speed.
What are you talking about? auto_ptr? shared_ptr? You don't pay for these if you don't use them; the language gives you the option of trading safety for speed. That's what I meant when I said that you don't have to pay for the features.

In any case, the reference-counting used by the safe pointers is probably an order of magnitude less heavy than a garbage collector. Even if you use them, you aren't paying that much...
I continue to use eBay, but only for obscure collectibles and art that can't be found anywhere else. They're still irreplaceable in that respect.

Still, it's hard to imagine why they think spamming themselves with fixed-price auctions is going to be beneficial. If anything, it hurts them by drowning out traditional auctions. Fraud and flaky sellers are too much of a problem on eBay to use them for any item I can find elsewhere.
I was pretty disappointed by this article; I'd expected to see something compelling here and there just wasn't anything there.

I try not to be swayed by proofreading issues and the like, but starting the article off implying that the Paul Graham "Equity" essay (which is clearly labeled to be from July 2007) was written a few days ago as a response to her colleague's Y Combinator critique set a really bad tone for the article.
Just out of interest; how old were you when you switched to 10PM ?