skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Money.

As a technical designer - where I do datacenter design - we have been talking about this for years.

The problem is cost. Google has a trifecta perfecta with this facility's location.

Google specifically picked this site for this reason -- but in the end, the reason that Google is able to do this is that they have a ton of money, they were given a good price for agreeing to preserve the historic site, they gave back part of the Mill's land for the erection of the wind-mills, which are not directly Google's. The tunnel to the sea was already there as a part of the cooling plant for the mill.

So, this is a straightforward -- fiberglass pipe to prevent corrosion and then the sea water pours over the heat exchangers.

The issue with doing this in san francisco is the environmentalists would kill you, the cost of tunneling would be prohibitive and the concern of the piping being seismically sound would cause difficulty.

So, it's really a matter of money and politics.

The design is great and simple.

I would prefer we take the mothball fleet in Benicia and turn them into a huge floating DC.

DISCLAIMER: my firm worked on this DC -- but the cable plant -- not the MEP.
If you find it TL;DR -- this video at the end of the page is very descriptive: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG3tLxEQEdg
Or, you won't and then no one will know how you did it.
I think you're just being bitter because you got rejected by YC, and now trying to deal with it by saying "Well, YC's not that great anyway".

With the value of YCs portfolio companies over $3 Billion, it's ridiculous to make the allegation that YC is some kind of pyramid scheme.
Given how configurable Firefox is, I'm sure they'll add an option to disable automatic updates even if it becomes a default feature.
This is significantly similar to part of a note I wrote a month or two ago, about 'Software as web' http://www.hxa.name/notes/note-hxa7241-20110314T2011Z.html

Functions calling (linking) each other, and being built out of available pieces, ideally at a global scale -- this is just like the structure of the web.

* Functions should have URLs

* Functions should be augmented with metadata, like their language/platform

* There should be more and more fully defined IMT/MIME data types for lots of data

(Although I am more casual about this idea, and am only thinking half-seriously.)
> To wit, I don't know of a school that charges more for a lucrative BS in CS than a less-useful BS in psychology

My alma mater, a public university in Ontario, Canada does this, but it appears to have more to do with government regulation of certain programs. Per-term fees differ by faculty, with arts and mathematics (not inluding CS) being almost the same, CS being much higher, and engineering slightly above CS.
I am guessing that any mathematician will understand "immersed surfaces in 4-manifolds"?

I think you are guessing wrong. A 4-manifold, that I can more or less understand (and that is about as far as one can get, as there are several slightly different definitions in common use), but immersed surfaces in manifolds? And I do not think that is because I haven't done abstract math since graduating. One can graduate in mathematics without encountering any manifold, for example by focussing more on applied fields such as discrete math, analysis, or statistics.

I do not think that that abstract is necessarily bad, though. It seems to mention sufficiently many terms to sell it to the target audience of, say, 100 people world-wide. If you do not know any of these, you should read something more basic.
Shannon's original paper is still a surprisingly good read: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pd...
Either way, there is a ton of land in many states along the great lakes. It seems like HVAC is a large component of energy expenditures at datacenters, but perhaps the savings don't justify it?
In my experience, the most important knowledge the idea guy lacks isn't how to code, it's how to plan and structure the project so that it can actually get done given whatever constraints. In order to get this, some level of technical understanding and grokking of programming is required, and this is the main asset that learning basic programming can bring to an idea guy, even if he never gets anywhere near good enough to write production code. Idea guys without that grounding tend to be overly ambitious and extremely susceptible to scope creep, not to mention more difficult for programmers to work with. These types of problems can easily be fatal to a project.

I should add that most developers don't seem to have much of this knowledge either. It comes from a rare blend of anticipating customer needs, technical understanding, and general pragmatism. The more projects I work on, the more I come to believe that someone who fills this gap is worth ten times more than both the dude with the 'great idea' and the all star coder.
Please note that this is an article about average people, making the headline entirely sensationalistic ("no sign"?). The average engineer has a set of skills that can easily be plugged directly into a corporate widget machine to profitable ends, and is paid accordingly. The average "fluffy major" has a set of skills inapplicable to much of anything. But what happens if you stop thinking about the average? I don't know the answer to that, but I do know plenty of fluffy major C-levels and directors.

But I also like JonnieCache's take on it in these comments; fluffy majors know better than to care about such base needs as material wealth!
I tried upgrading to FF4 on OSX, and it was a disaster: crashing on me left, right, and center. I went back to FF3.6 in under a week of use. I suggest OSX users wait for some stability updates before upgrading.
The people that Paul is describing when he says 'People that get what they want...' and the 'Naughtiness', are people that win in things that they try. the naughtiness implies that they do whatever it takes to get their, even if they ride the edge of moral good.

They want these types of people because they have the highest chance at success when failure is the norm.
Please, just stop.

I mean, I love quoting tangentially-related old movies too, I think it's totally the highest form of wit, but the url for fark.com is "fark.com".
Your ability to sell your business plan to a bank or VC and get funding, thus paying your developer/programmer hourly wages, is a good test of how well you will run the company.
A lot of people can't resist the temptation to live at higher-and-higher means, so the quest for a "solid financial base" converges to the standard rat race.

It's hard to realize that happiness is everywhere, even in abject poverty, when you are financially comfortable.

It takes a lot of effort and a unique mindset to change momentum when you're on a successful trajectory; you're less likely to take a risk to discover a more meaningful life.

You will make connections and develop a lifestyle that keep you happy and comfortable enough that you will not want to make a change, even when that change would eventually be for the better.

Life will happen. If there's something you're curious about or otherwise want to do, why wait?
How many times is the same blog post going to get written? I feel like this is the same 1000 words I read a few days ago on the same subject.
Gray code at the pediatrician's office
used grab on OS X (creates tiff ...)
I think idea guys (or non technical cofounders) would do much better finding a programmer to work with if they approached developers more collaboratively.

Most of the pitches I get from 'idea guys' are very specific technical solutions that flatly will not work as designed because (lacking knowledge) they made some poor assumptions.

Much better would be an idea guy that came and said: "I've found X problem in the market, solving it would be worth Y dollars annually, what approach would you take to solve that?"

In my current startup (with a non-technical cofounder) we delineate this as the 'what' and the 'how'. He has much greater domain knowledge than I do, he describes what the problem is, how painful it is to the customers, etc. I figure out how to best implement solutions to those issues. Obviously it isn't quite that cut and dried, but in general the approach has been working.

Calling my current co-founder 'non-technical' or 'the idea guy' does him a great disservice as he is incredibly capable and the very definition of the kickass get off the ground business guy (wrangling VC, making sales, talking to customers)
After a little search i found this http://hddfancontrol.com/ — good work! Looks good, i will give it a try.
Extenze Reviews
Extenze is capable of having long drive as long as you have firm erection and can retain you staying power until you reaches your climax. Check it out http://herbal-remedies-reviews.com
I can't tell if you're talking about this as if it actually means something or not.
Google is "good"?

http://www.schneier.com/essay-306.html

http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/05/technology/google_cnet/

https://www.recordedfuture.com/ ( Google and In-Q-Tel both major investors )

http://thestockmarketwatch.com/stock-market-news/recent-even...

http://xsreviews.co.uk/2011/05/google-to-lose-500m-to-antitr...

Could keep going for a while. My point is simple: It is easy to forget the "bad" when everyone focuses on the "good"
Previous discussions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=667689

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=899913
I didn't know about SDCH, looks pretty neat.
Tap tap tap ~ The Heist: Can You Crack The Vault?
>That said, a study that includes post-bachelor degrees in the ranking would be interesting. What would be especially informative would be a combined ranking that factors the average cost of education in with the average earnings increase/decrease.

Yeah, I think the most useful comparison would be to make comparisons based on the average return for the most typical terminal degree in your field would be, or at least to give you a suite of responses based on varying degrees.

>Perhaps a masters in psychology still gets you less than a BS in mathematics, perhaps not, but it would be neat to see.

As a side note, is a BS in pure math particularly useful, beyond the fact that it's a bachelor's degree? That always struck me as one of those disciplines that would require an advanced degree to be of use. (My freshman year calculus TA, when asked by one of his students if he was going for a master's, said, "No, I'm a PHD student. The master's degree is the door prize of mathematics.")
Thanks for the link. I've been using qmpd on the mac with a lot of success for some time now, but I'll check out the native solution.
I think a partnership can make sense if there is complimentary leverage, i.e. both parties bring something to the table that the other can leverage to their benefit + the combination of both parties creates additional leverage.

Just having the idea in most situations just isn't a lot of leverage for a developer to become interested. But if you pair an idea up with:

Idea + capital,
Idea + connections,
Idea + salesmanship,
Idea + passion + market opportunity + timing etc...,
Idea + hustle,
Idea + mentorship / experience,
Idea + proof of concept, initial customers etc,
Idea + market knowledge with a significant edge over others,
Idea + accounting / misc biz skills

or a combination of those...and then you should be able to find a developer that is able to see enough upside to work with an idea person. The default answer shouldn't need to be 'learn how to code' in most cases. My viewpoint is to not do what you're hopeless at in 99% cases. There's not a lot of leverage there - ideas like speed. It's more valuable to get better at what you're already good at. If you're stubbornly trying to learn how to code and design despite hating the process, you simply didn't exhaust other avenues that yield a more expedient route to launching whatever idea/vision you have.

I did go down the learn how to code/design/market myself route because it's fun to me and that's a form of leverage that gives a potent edge. But I really hate seeing people struggle because they suck at what they are trying to learn, don't enjoy what they are learning but yet are using such things as obstacles to be conquered that they falsely believe are necessary to succeed. Sometimes it's just an excuse not to be doing what you're good at.
> pausing to ask abstract and esoteric questions

Is there something in CS that prevents CS majors from asking abstract questions? The CS I know has a large, abstract part and any and all concrete things you see today originated from abstract reasoning. Didn't Lisp originate from an abstract paper implementing a turing-complete machine from basic operators?

This is the second post I am replying to which talks about insights and abstract questions which technical(or CS) people supposedly lack. It would really help to have a couple of concrete examples.
Can't wikipedia's heritage 'metric' also be a factor of hours humans have, in general, enjoyed it (in the broader sense, as in use, derive benefit from)?
I'll be really crushed if AT&T makes me get rid of my grandfathered in unlimited data plan and I have to start worrying about this kind of thing.

With these arbitrarily low data caps (2 gigs I think?) I'd really like to see something implemented that let users know they were going over and gave them an option to disable the data connection. Or when I go over disable my 3g and only use edge.. or something like that... However, telcos don't appear to care much about customer service, only profit margins, so this isn't likely to happen.
It's the whole circle-jerk that tech and web have become. Why on earth is Techcrunch hosting a business conference where hosts can fellate big Silicon Valley success stories. On TWiT, they used to talk about tech; now all they talk about is VCs and angel investors.

Tech is so hopeless ingrained with the speculative investment market, they've adopted the worst biproducts of it.
An app store of monitoring plugins (Server Density)
Purify, am i correct? Nice work, congrats on the positive income ;)
A sense of aesthetics?

(Let me guess, that answer doesn't count because it cannot be quantified.)
Oh, and here I was assuming the ((giggling)) `anthropomorphic Stuxnet' (the whole phrase) was a parabole for some other malware, spontaneous network effect (like the popular `routing around censorship') or perhaps a hacktivist group. Disappointed a bit now that you explained it, but thanks anyway :-) Somehow I've missed the fact that Stuxnet worked via good ole sneakernet rather than the usual kind of network.

Semi-related, there was that old sci-fi story by Stanisław Lem. A mad scientist was researching two AIs (based on organical matter, IIRC) that somehow communicated with one another in spite of some distance and thorogh screening of all known means of communication. The scientist was puzzled beyond comprehension; story's protagonist notes the scientist himself served as as unnwitting messenger -- as he (affectionaly) touched AI's chassiss, he subconsciously passed data by taping on 'em, probably somehow `programmed' to do so by the other AI. Oh well.
Those who left for 7chan were a superset of those who were banned.
Common Lisp can be compiled one function at a time, and functions belong to packages, which are pretty much key-value databases you can modify, where keys are strings (name of the function) and the values are the functions themselves. So if there is something wrong with some function, I just update the value in the "database" and all callers will call the newly defined function from now on. Nothing magical really. This workflow is supported by the CL IDEs such as SLIME.
Even if "how fast can you pick up a programming language" is your only metric, I would imagine that individual talent/intelligence/determination are better indicators than college major. I.e. I'd bet that between two identical people, one a Humanities major and the other a CS major, the CS major would obviously pick up a PL faster, but between an average CS major and an excellent Humanities major, I'd put my money on the Humanities.

It's wholly possible that I'd lose that bet.

The bigger point, though, to me, is that "how fast can you pick up a programming language" isn't what I thought about when choosing a major. That's not what I thought college was about.

I honestly believe that employers would do better to consider Humanities majors who did very well in school, and otherwise demonstrate that they're intelligent, disciplined, and capable if not yet specifically qualified for the job. That's probably harder to figure out, but filtering by degree, then, is just laziness.

It does appear that college is becoming a more vocational education, which I think is unfortunate. And that's probably because employers think like you do. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
I'd love to see the plot of percentage of income vs percentage of taxes paid over time for each quintile.

If the top quintile grew the percentage of income more than 2.2X over the same time period, that quintile is paying proportionally less while paying a higher share.

Any links for percentage of income by quintile? (not wealth, income)
RFID Skimming Demos on Streets of NYC
The problem with averages is that they don't tell you the distribution of salaries. Take a look at the top 1000 earners in the US and tell me what their degrees are in. Something tells me it's not going to be petroleum engineering.
Unless you're in Washington state like me. Then only about half of their total functionality works due to the antiquated system they still have in place.
There's a long-standing Chrome bug where middle-clicking target="NAMED" links opens them in a new tab in the foreground, not the background as is expected. So annoying.

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=62319
Is it worth reposting the yarn from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman about teaching physics in Brazil?
tokenadult, you're the only other person I know who read that book. I found it dusty in a university library years ago while I was pursuing my PhD and it was an eye opening read. I'd love to buy a copy ,but it is so expensive. But thanks for reminding me of it.
Yeah, I'm also very confused. While I think it's a good idea to be pushing relases more often, this is way too often.

Here's the about Firefox dialog http://i.imgur.com/cDbN1.png and the update request http://i.imgur.com/4SYRI.png
I somewhat expected JS-based OCR. But this is cool, too!
These were my thoughts exactly. Any intelligent, ambitious individual will find a way to succeed, regardless of the chosen University major.

But the practical skills taught in BUS, CS, ENG etc are more valuable in a corporate setting, and hence for the majority of folks who just want to get a job.
I agree with this. There are lots of talented developers out there with public resumes available for view. The problem isn't necessarily what's written on their resume alone. It's a combination of factors. That said, I think its more valuable for people to get advice on what things a potential employer would look for in a resume and among other things.
Are you using a library for the user stuff in mongo/node, if you don't mind me asking? I haven't found anything that seems better than devise/cancan.
It just visually caps at -4 even though the subsequent downvotes are still applied to your total score. This was an effort to limit d/vs a long time ago I believe. It's obviously not been lifted even now comment scores are hidden. It's been like that for as long as I've been a user.

No-one is hunting down your other comments and d/ving them. It really is just that your comment is at -8, even though it says -4.

I understand the sentiment you're expressing, but you went too far. Yes PG is not always right and shouldn't be quoted as if anything he says is fact. On the other hand there are ways of pointing out unbridled fanboyism politely.
One thing you may want to consider adding to your client is a "mongotunnel" command which will set up an ssh tunnel with compression between the user's computer and your mongodb servers. I've noticed some significant performance benefit to this vs. just accessing mongod normally over the internet, mostly due to the abysmal upload rate on my cable modem. Also this allows you to avoid sending data in plain-text over the open internet.
Excellent advice here
And one of the big weaknesses of Wikipedia, at least in English[0], is that few Wikipedia editors go beyond Google or their own personal experience in sourcing articles.

I guess you can count me as one of the few. I was in my university's library for a week researching and sourcing this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domenico_Selvo
> More often than not, insights originate from relevant background.

The really excellent insights come from people with seemingly irrelevant background who are making a connection that people with only the typical backgrounds wouldn't. Philosophy of science and philosophy of language have helped me immensely in computer science. As has use of deductive sorts of processes (philosophy is a lot like debugging).

>Do you think HN crowd has poorer communication skill compared to your non-technical crowd?

That's not really a good comparison.

You would have to compare a randomly selected set of humanities majors against a randomly selected set of engineers. On average, I'd say both groups would lose to people on HN.

GEB and the Feynman book are as much works of literature as they are technical pieces. GEB in particular requires knowledge of multiple realms, which is what makes it difficult.
Is it bad that I want to browse using this bare idea? I had Ubiquity installed in FF3.6, and it was quite handy. The inline maps and other website commands were more and more useful as you got used to them. Integrating it into the browser like this would be at least a neat experiment, if not a useful fork/revamp of Firefox.
Not only is it annoying but it broadcasts "You are using a Windows machine". Which to be also broadcasts "This machine is completely untrustworthy for financial purposes."

Oh, and a lot of them are Diebolds...
> information design, human resource management, and promotion strategies -- many of the "soft skills" that most engineering schools do not stress upon.

Engineering schools aren't there to teach you human resource management and promotional strategies. When people need it, they pick it up on their own, like you claim to have done. Most of the startups run by engineers do their own promotion and management - is their something you learnt which says you can do it better than the engineers who are doing it? I highly doubt it. I am not putting you down - I am just saying the things as they appear to me.

Information design, in the sense of good UX, is picked by people who have the knack for it; others hire help. UX is largely a black art and I would rather trust someone with a track record than someone who claims to have learnt it while studying art.

> and the "critical thinking" skill it teaches is actually an extremely worthwhile and essential skill

Critical thinking is important. What does humanities do which teaches critical thinking, and what do CS programs do which hampers critical thinking? If anything, hard sciences are supposed to inculcate critical thinking.

> Which leads to engineers being biased to hiring other engineers.

That's called heuristics. If the project needs an engineer, why would I go looking for a non-engineer? If you don't have a degree, but a track record, that's fine. But why on earth would I care about you humanities degree.
All technical issues set a part, beams of neutrinos sounds like an excellent way to transmit information. A beam travelling at the speed of light, trough matter - without any interaction or distortion when passing trough.

Goodbye satellites and fiber-optic cables, we can now transmit ones and zeroes straight trough mother earth.
Tepco: Partial Meltdown Occurred At Unit No. 2 and 3
It looks like Chromium doesn't have it but Google Chrome has a built in PDF viewer.
Fostering Innovative Spirit in the Medical Technology World