skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't understand stories like these at all. Why are still seeing this from a Cold War perspective?

First, in what possible sense is a Chinese manned spaceflight program a challenge to the U.S. If we apply the same standard to the Russians, haven't we've already "lost"? What's with the International Space Station, can China not join the club? The first item in the National Aeronautics and Space Act [1]:

>(a) Devotion of Space Activities to Peaceful Purposes for Benefit of All
>Humankind.--Congress declares that it is the policy of the United States that
>activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of
>all humankind.

Second, why no division of labor? Let China do manned spaceflight. Hell, let's chip in (aside from debt service on all those T-bills). We can do plenty of cool stuff: start flinging bacterial spores into interstellar space, submersible probe(s) on Europa, etc.

[1]: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/ogc/about/space_act1.html#POLICY
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.

- Ecclesiates 1:9
i got a kindle for xmas. it is amazing. however i've grown up in a house where every wall is covered by a bookshelf full of books. i love owning them, i love the fact that my father and me exchange books and than when i was a kid i could read the very same book that my father read as a child because he saved all of them.

i don't want my children to grow up in a house with no books, so i intend to only read ebook of books i own.

i am against most of the forms of piracy, but frankly i don't like the idea of having to pay for the paper version AND the electronic version of a book. i don't feel it like it's buying two copies of the same book, but more like having to pay for the same book twice because one time you read it on the bus and the other time you read it on the couch. it's the same book whose rights i've already payed once, i think i buy the right of reading like i prefer.
Damn, their VPS packages cost less then I'm paying for shared hosting at Dreamhost. Unfortunately, a cursory search shows mixed reviews. Have you used them personally?
No need for a boycott. If they're so unreliable, customers will move away themselves.
This exactly the point I was trying to make -- this was a nightmare, but at least I could do something about it. The same exact thing could happen with SOPA, but instead of jumping registrars and getting things fixed, the situation would require court, and potentially fines and jail.

If SOPA passes, and this happened, we would be dead. Users won't wait around for months while the courts slog through a case, they'll just move to the next app.
I didn't realize that I could set up my own DNS on my own IP addresses. Thank you very much for the suggestion, I'll look into this.

By the way, do you know off the top of your hand any such registrars with more complimentary policies?
Friend of mine worked on this: http://bribespot.com/
Not bad, looks like the boycott almost brought (new + transferred in) - (deleted + transferred out) close to 0 for the day.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but even if you run your own DNS servers, can't your domain name registrar still decide to take away your domain name?
December was a good month for us!! 2nd full month post launch and we doubled our user database, got exposure from a BBC Travel Blog had more Spanish translations than anything, lol. We contracted a demo video, a home page redesign, and some copy editing which went great. I am the non-tech co-founder and have been marketing my fanny off with a budget of $200/mo. What I have concentrated on is blogging and building a Twitter presence (I need followers.)

When we started, we Beta tested with friends and family... roughly 30 people who were afraid of hurting our feelings - not a good idea! Then we soft launched into a Public Beta, got picked up by Killer Start-ups but we were still learning about promotion copy and I can't say it was our very best foot forward but had some traffic and got some users. By the end of Nov. we had 100 - today it is over 200 so if this trend continues then by the end of 2012 we will have 1.6 Million users - not bad for a year old app!

I think a lot of us hit the ground wanting instant success - there is a big part of me that does but as I define 'instant' in terms of realistic time - one year is pretty darn 'instant'. So... I plug along and learn, read, learn & read some more. I connect, comment, blog, and believe.

uencounter.me went from an idea to a concept to a project to a fully realized app in 10 months time. When we get to 1.6 million users by this time next year ... that will be 'instant' enough for me.
The other lesson I'd add is that if an instance dies and can't be rebooted, you'll need to stop/start it, which will result in an IP address change.

Best to have elastic IPs at the ready for that instance, or be prepared to deal with the IP changes.
They also go after places that enable spammers - such as when they blocked Google Docs [1]

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Spamhaus-We-Blocked-Google-Do...
Pascal's pointer semantics are interesting. Because it's possible to detect when a value is used before being initialized, this reduces the probability of unintentional null pointer dereferences.

Subranges are also a nice feature.

Those, and nested procedures are about all I can come up with.
I also use Zerigo, and have been happy with the service.
> I guess the first step is to set up better monitoring services to prevent your system from being abused by even one bad apple.

I'd love to, but when you have the volume we do there are going to be false negatives. Bad apples will slip through. And if somebody slips through, we're vulnerable for getting blacklisted.

> If your paying customers are important to you, use a different system for them.

This is a very good plan. I'm definitely looking into that...
Can you elaborate on what's so wrong with EBS? Are you thinking more about performance, or reliability?

I'm wondering in particular what you'd suggest in cases where RDS is not an option, if you're running your own MongoDB server or something like that. I don't think S3 is really an option there, is it?

Or would you tend to do everything on the instance store and periodically do a manual snapshot to S3?
he's a consistent, ideological antifederalist who thinks decentralization is the way to go.

Wouldn't that actually make him a federalist? Federalists support the type of government called a federation, which is what the Articles of Confederation originally created and the Constitution sort of maintained.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist
Another Amazon link bait post! -.-
I'm suddenly put in mind of the "corporate personhood" debate that's picked up once again in the U.S., recently.

Who is a "person", and what right or permission do or don't they have to be an account holder?

As for your point, it's a reason I'm moving back to self-hosting. I've had enough of "share-cropping".
Dear GoDaddy – Why I’m Moving Out (aka You suck not just because of SOPA)
The US has large amounts of natural resources that are untapped for various reasons; forcing us to purchase these resources from other countries. Sometimes I wonder if the goal is to force others to use/sell up their resources first.
Stop driving in the rear view mirror. I applaud Startup Chile for their efforts, but I think this whole conversation focuses on the wrong questions. One of the biggest challenges with Startup Chile or other similar program is that without a common language or framework around early-stage value creation milestones, the fallback mechanism is to measure how entrepreneurs spend money. This is like driving in the rearview mirror and the approach hasn't historically achieved optimal results. Is it possible that the reason we aren't achieving higher hit rates on startups is that we are measuring the wrong things?

If we look at the "startup industry" as an industry, we should ask ourselves some tough questions like... What other industry in the world has an 80% to 90% failure rate? And why is such a high failure rate acceptable?

I don't fault Startup Chile for their program and think we should all be working to push these startup conversations forward. To improve the odds of a positive outcome, here are the questions I would ask if I ran such a program. "How much more effective would these programs be if the focus was on agreed to customer-centric value creation milestones and then capital was deployed based on achieving these milestones? What if the entrepreneur or startups were measured on building products that 1) nail the customer's pain, 2) nail the minimum feature set to satisfy the customer demand, 3) nail the business model or go-to-market strategy? etc...

In addition to reimbursing for expenses, an effective startup program could tranche additional seed capital based on how the startup achieved early success and nailed early value-creation milestones. Give high-potential entrepreneurs a little bit of guaranteed runway is great. In addition, provide them follow-on financing in the form of tranched performance payments based on successful execution.

Doing this would require an agreed to framework. Here's a link to a recent conversation thread on one possible way to achieve this. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3406330
Yes, the registrars handle the ns assignment which will make DNS moot if modified or deleted.
> in fact many societies / civilizations never even understood or used zero in arithmetic

Yeah, but those societies were uniformly terrible at math.
"is there any possible way to not get randomly nuked by Spamhaus?"

As any email administrator will tell you, "no". The best you can do is take measures to prevent abuse coming from your domain name/IP, but bad things still do happen. You are still at the mercy of spamhaus (and other rbl providers).
Also note that there exists a <progress> HTML5 element: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#the-progr...
I'm up for renewal in february with them, could you suggest a better host?
The fetus is trespassing on the women's body, and it would be self-defense to remove the invader.
Two questions: (1) What does domination of space look like, number of military satellites?; (2) What weapons has the US deployed in space?
Great discussion - would be an interesting poll to see exactly what hardware setups HN users run. When looking at options for our bootstrapped startup, was very surprised to find the costs of Amazon compared to dedicated boxes, or even a couple of dedicated VPS instances. It appears so many people I have spoken to who use AWS do not even automatically spin up instances when they need them, so have to manually react and then bring them up... And another startup who have automatically scaled up the instances have also had massive bills when someone found a loophole and distributed manga art via their services.
Effects on the deficit in one graph
Do you like your team members? If not, find out why and find a reason to like them. Once you develop that basis to like your team members, everything else will fall in to place. You will take interest in their activities, not just in terms of getting your work done, but in terms of what they are trying to achieve.

Talk to your team members on an individual basis frequently and in an informal setting - people are much more open in an informal setting. Keep these meetings to 5 mins. If there are more topics than can be covered in 5 mins, increase the frequency of meetings, not the length.

Never do your team member's work. Help them in every way for them to do their work, but just don't do it for them.

(Break every rule / advice that people are giving out. Finding what works for you is one of best parts of management)
I love Hacker News, but this is MORE a response to what gets featured on the Twitter feed. It's either this or, as many others have stated, very conventional "VC gave us a ton of money so we're super special, are you a super special/rockstar/careabouthteuserexperience developer? Work for us dummy" articles.
IMHO: relationships are personally unless explicitly called out in a contract. If I met someone, I met them, you can't take that back. If a relationship is that vital to the company then safe guards of some sort need to be in place.
What a ridiculous tabloid article.
Luton airport taxi
Dial 020 8449 0000 and get 50% off compare to other Taxi Minicab Car companies Airport Heathrow Barnet Gatwick Luton Stansted City London Transfer Local Transfer Surrey Executive Cars
I would like to be clear that I like Hacker News and I like Paul Graham's writing/thinking, but the posts that end up getting featured, especially on the Twitter feed, are starting to make me gag.
This is useful. They look great. I recently used SWFUpload to allow customers to upload large files directly to S3 and it works great. However, it provides no UI for keeping users informed about the status of their uploads out of the box. Twitter Bootstrap also doesn't provide anything like this. In that instance I ended up putting something together myself, but I'd have way rather have had something like this to use off the shelf. Thanks!
cool idea, not sure how much change it would effect though as it seems there isn't real evidence that can really damage the people taking the bribes
Nit: Ron Paul has an MD, not a Ph.D. He was a OB/GYN before being elected to congress.
It was killed by Google Docs:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-google-docs-kil...

short version: google engineers have fast wifi everywhere they go, synchronizing to the hd looks pointless to them.
You need to compare costs on the comparable commitment time-frame. You are assuming a 3 year commitment with Amazon. Classic hosting has a monthly commitment.
Web Accessibility: Images require alternative text [video]
Thanks for sharing to remind us all. A non-compete for a minimum of X years clause might have helped the sting a bit.
In its most simple and irreducible form, the challenge is this: big-screen movies need to offer an experience so preferable to home viewing (or video games, or TV, or other uses of leisure time) that customers will pay time and ticket prices for it.

That's becoming harder and harder, because all sides of the equation have been getting hit. On the pricing side, it goes without saying that higher prices place a greater burden on entertainment value. But on the entertainment side, we now have a) alternatives (Netflix, video games, etc.) that are increasingly attractive, inexpensive, and readily available, and b) movie offerings that have, at best, held steady in their general entertainment value.

Interestingly, the theater-going experience itself has been improving over the past few decades. But at the heart of it all, customers aren't there for the window dressing; they're there for the content. A juicy piece of IP, such as Harry Potter, would drive people to a run-down shithole of a theater if they had to go -- but conversely, a shitty product wouldn't attract people to the nicest theater ever built. So, while we can all applaud the efforts of theater chains to improve their general offerings -- atmosphere, food, dining, etc. -- we shouldn't believe that such improvements are wholly sufficient, or ever could be. (At worst, if the cost of such atmosphere, ambience, furnishings, services, etc., eventually leaks into the ticket prices, then theaters are making the game even harder for themselves).

In summation, I place the burden for the future of the big-screen movie business primarily on the shoulders of the movie studios. Not the exhibitors. Studios can't keep rehashing the same, warmed-over crap each year and expect anything more than a dice roll from the outcome. They need to place bigger bets with breakthrough IP. They need to wean themselves from the largely mistaken belief that uber-expensive movie stars drive box office attendance (overseas, they do; domestically, there's almost zero correlation). And they need to go all-in on the bets they do place. No more licensing, buying, or developing 100 properties to produce 2. Borrow a page from the Apple product philosophy, and launch only the titles you are dead serious about supporting. Fewer, but better.

Finally, as a whole, the industry needs to stop being so stridently anti-consumer. Enough with the war on piracy, the DRMs, the 50 super-uber-ZOMG-uncensored-platinum-edition releases of every title on DVD and Blu-ray, and so forth. Studios, you are product companies. Focus your time, your attention, your budgets, and your people on your products. And make every product count.
> Look, the two most decentralized first-world countries that I can think of are Canada and Switzerland. These are not draconian racist hellholes

But the South was. You're ignoring the evidence of history. Canada and Switzerland are simply much less diverse, and it's pretty naive to think that racists in Mississippi and Alabama, who never went away, wouldn't seize on the chance to reinstitute something resembling Jim Crow laws.

Edit: > No, he's a states rights guy because he's a states rights guy

The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club. He's a states rights guy because he's a Christian fundamentalist who wants the power to enforce his provincial values on others, and the federal government gets in the way of that.
How do you give a direction to the annihilation?
This (non-canonical) interpretation of the UR<x> schemata works for me (in terms of dealing with ambiguity of the canonical specification):

Names: universally unique and fully scoping the life-cycle of the (logical) object. 1:1.

Identifiers: unique in context of an authority with a life-cycle that is maximally (but not necessarily) bounded by the life-cycle of the named entity (and of course, the authority that assigns it). e.g. http://www.ssa.gov/history/ssn/geocard.html is the authority that issues SSN identifiers. An entity can potentially have multiple such identifiers. 1:N

Locations: The location of an image or representation of the entity. 1:N (e.g. CDNs)
By the way, what is the process for getting on the front page? I'll be honst, with 19 points and a few comments I expected this thread to appear on the first or second page, but I can't even find it. Damn I hope Paul Graham isn't mad at me.
It should have been more convincing for me if he instead made this statement before the goDaddy boycott, and net giants public opposition against SOPA, not a few days before the election circus.

Politics is still politics, and this kind of rhetorical display and timing have long been around for centuries as politicians' device that pander to the media to get the favor from the people. I do not question his principles and previous acts, it's the timing that's fishy.
yeah, that's why you want to find one that won't. or at least, won't do it in a way that will leave you high and dry without notice.
You invite your friend to your home for a party. Your guest walked to your home. A blizzard starts outside. Your friend does something that pisses you off. You kick him out of your home, into the blizzard. He dies as a result.

Were you just asserting your property rights or did you commit murder?
Then tuesday is the new monday.. you can't escape it. Also, easier to cope with changes over the weekend for those doing international business.
Seems too good to be true. Have you used them? That $19 a year plan is very interesting.
[edit] I couldn't help it... On sale for $15, I bought. Seems like a great server to play around with stuff on.
Cool! A very nice read.. thanks for sharing. I actually looked at that puzzle but decided strawberry fields was more interesting. My solution comes up with reasonably efficient answers within a minute or so, even on a 1000h eeepc :) I don't have a nice writeup like you but the README contains a brief explanation (in concordance with the rules for the puzzle): https://github.com/BruceJillis/Strawberry-Fields I decided to post this because you mention constraints and my solution is written up in a constraint logic programming language (eclipse), it might be interesting to translate your solution and compare.
Upvoted you for the interesting discussion.

After I saw your first comment, I started writing out all billion numbers. It appears to be getting exponentially slower, which I suppose is to be expected as the file gets too big to fit in available contiguous blocks (there was only 100 GB free before it started).

It's been running for about an hour and is only half done, although writing 7 GB files would definitely be much faster; I don't know if sort --merge creates one big file at the end or not, but there are ways around that since it would be the bottleneck. It does sound like it could be done with sort in a semi-reasonable amount of time, although there'd still be more work to do once it's sorted.

In terms of writing the code itself, the parser is pretty similar to a toy computer algebra system I had written in the past (it's much simpler), so I had some pre-disposition to it in that sense, and the traversal is fairly straight forward given the grammar. I chose a problem that I thought I could solve in an afternoon because I knew I had real work to do the following Monday and still had to write the blog post, and Parkinson's Law may have helped me push through it a bit too. :)

Edit to reply to edit: This puzzle is actually retired from ITA's fleet, and I'm not interested in applying to ITA/Google anyway. I'm happily employed, and actually this is sort of the reverse: I'm looking to hire remote software devs at BuySellAds.com and was hoping this would pique the interest of the qualified segment of devs looking for a job.
.95c only gives a time dilation factor of ~3x, that's not very much.
Samoans mostly live and work in/with Australia and New Zealand. Doesn't that make more sense, than pretending they are closer to the U.S.?
Thanks for taking the time to write this up -- and, as well, your post on email storage encryption.

My problem in all this is rolling some Windows machines into the mix.
One at a Time
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/30/chinese_space_white_...
I was actually agreeing with that--when I was a kid, I could actually sit through a kid's movie. If kids today empirically can't do that, then maybe they have changed.
When my wife goes to the bathroom at a restaurant, I can either check Twitter
or read a couple of pages on the phone.

Maybe you should spend these few minutes in quiet contemplation? You can learn a lot by exploring your mind during quiet times and not constantly binging on information.
I'm a fan of Lost Signal, I've got a single dedicated server box with them right now. It's a small operation but very hands on. https://lostsignalweb.com/services/shared
Probably not.

The OP said that he let the person go. I doubt very much that a business can fire/lay off a person and then also say that they can't work in the same industry for some period of time.
If you are in North America, check out https://www.arin.net/resources/transfer_listing/needers.html for details concerning address delegations.

I work for a registrar, so here are my biased recommendations - me (hover.com) or EasyDNS. But don't take my word for it - do your own homework. Its worth knowing what your risks are and no amount of free advice on HN can replace that.
Plans for Nodecamp.eu 2012
I took Tufte's one day class up in New Haven a couple of months ago. So now you know...

edit: anything you particularly like about him?
Unison has mostly been trouble for me. I'm definitely in need of a replacement for it. Doing point to multipoint syncing, it tends to get confused and need to be manually resynchronized; and above a certain total directory byte size, which I've long since exceeded, it can't sync at all (and you have to manually break your directory into pieces and sync them separately.)
I use linode but I was happy with slicehost before also. Granted I've never run popular apps/websites on these so I am not sure how they'd treat abuse complaints.
There are Roman bridges still standing, and Roman roads still in use.