skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't worry about Google's software quality. We do a really good job on that front. Every machine that Google owns is capable of running Gmail, and failover is a planned use case. Data centers can fail, machine can fail, code can fail, and everything will still work for you. (The process is fully automated and regularly tested.) We have an entire job classification for people whose job it is to build automated testing infrastructure -- not write the tests, but write tools to make writing tests easier. We have people to write the tests, too, and of course every developer writes tests. Every code change, no matter how small, is reviewed by one other developer who knows the relevant code deeply. And all changes are tested internally before they ever go public.

So basically, it's pretty rare that you would lose your email. It's happened before, but everything was restored from tape. I run my own email server for fun, but I'd be lying if I said that I did it better than Google.
Another interesting twist (not surprised at all, though). MPAA lied about the number of people being employed by the entertainment industry:

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/images/sopa_busted.g...

The tech industry employs 10 times as many. I'm glad their lies are finally debunked. We need to debunk their "lost revenue" numbers, too.
Revisiting the Californication Trademark Dispute
I think everyone finds a different way to build their tolerance for discomfort. Rejection therapy is one of many ways. You can even approach gaining the prerequisite qualities using relentless resourcefulness - learn about overcoming fear, expose yourself to scary situations, repeat.
No not intended to be ironic, just badly worded.

What I meant was that I am surprised how important campaign contributions are in an age where it is fairly cheap to get your message across online and get people talking.

After all the London riots were an example (albeit not a pleasant one) of how social networking etc can very quickly get people to take action.

Hopefully you could get enough contributions from private citizens and small business to run an effective campaign.

Regards the 2 parties point. It would be difficult to create a third party that would appeal to both liberals and conservatives so in reality you might need a 4th party also.

I assume your suggesting that people wouldn't vote for a 3rd party because the media would tell everyone that they were unelectable and a wasted vote?

Unfortunately I don't really have an answer for that question, the only way around it would be to hammer home just how bad the current system really is.
Note that this could in part be an attempt to circumvent the unenforceability of non-competes in California.

I keep banging on this drum, but it bears repeating: Silicon Valley/the Bay area is unique in the world, and compared to other would be competitors, in the US at least, is unique when it comes to public policy on non-competes.
SOPA is dead. Are you happy now?
> You don't have to sell the TV, just don't watch movies on it.

But the "content companies" don't only create movies. Now they own large swaths of normal TV. Disney owns ABC which owns ESPN. So every time you watch an advert on SportsCenter, you're funding Disney.

The fact is, you can't win at this game. The way to win is to create an alternate funding mechanism (ie, campaign finance reform and/or owning your own congresscritters). The media cartel owns the (so called public) airwaves.
Perhaps the answer to this is to make it more difficult for politicians to sign off on bills. Require some sort of education on the topic at hand before making a decision. If the bill isn't understood by the representative, they shouldn't be allowed to vote. With the current organization of our government, this will never happen. A point that Marco touched on was that we won't be able to rely on protesting every single bad decision that comes our way; people will lose interest and control will eventually be back in the hands of the government. He's right and we need to really focus on the bigger picture of removing lobbying from congress and ensuring that those representing us actually can.
It appears that the gist of the article is: don't plan, just be awesome and lucky. The article also drips with survivorship bias,e.g., the "good relationships happen without a plan" concept does not taken into account those who don't plan and don't end up in relationships. The author could just say "being awesome and lucky worked for me, I bet it could work wonders for you, too!"
In Which I Fix My Girlfriend’s Grandparents’ WiFi...
Unchained Reaction, a new Rube Goldberg inspired reality show by the Mythbusters
Static vs. Formal Methods for Code Auditing
I wouldn't put important things on YouTube with the need and expectation that they not disappear, either.
Dono what part of Canada you've been to, but they are all over the place in Toronto.
An upcoming version, that fixes font rendering problems, is mentioned here:

http://groups.google.com/group/issh/msg/f16d119aa00d3570
This doesn't deserve downvotes. Its a legitimate, and smart, way of approaching vi for a lot of reasons. In my opinion, it should be <10 lines

I'll agree with you though I like to have at least a few in there like autoindent, various tabstop and search related settings, or syntax highlighting.
The best part about stopping to support companies that support the MPAA and RIAA is that they are going to say they are loosing revenue through piracy and not direct consumer withdrawal.
"Today, when an end user running Firefox wants to download an update, addon or persona, the browser sends a URL request to Mozilla’s download cluster. The servers running Linux, Apache, and PHP run a query to the backend database/memcache cluster and return an HTTP Redirect URL (also called an HTTP 302 return) back to the browser so that Firefox can fetch the desired file from the network of donated download resources."

http://www.seamicro.com/sites/default/files/MozillaCaseStudy...
Technology's favorite lawyer, Lawrence Lessig, has a new book out advocating for campaign finance reform. Like most things from Lessig, his arguments are well-considered, balanced and thought-provoking.

He includes a quote I found particularly compelling, especially in the light of Marco's link between 'the next SOPA' and campaign finance reform: For every one striking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root. - Thoreau. Marco wants us to strike the root.

Book: http://www.amazon.com/Republic-Lost-Money-Corrupts-Congress/...

NYTimes review: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/books/republic-lost-campai...
Who decides that the rep is properly educated? You risk allowing more bias into the system by putting such a gate on voting.
How did you get your operating system to do that?
this is awesome. any ideas of open sourcing, licensing, price range etc.? you could market this as a competitor to the recently announced iBooks Author
I agree with all the other posters. I'd like to add that this all depends on your own character and disposition. For some people being a cog in a wheel in an organization with 100k employees for 140k a year isn't worth even a fraction of the opportunity to learn, contribute and matter on a 5-10 people team for 50-70k a year. Others like the comfort of their 9-5 routine and of their 401k and might have all kinds of duties that make them a bad fit for a startup (for example a large family to support), in which case a startup might not be for you.
Ask HN: Opinions about LiteSpeed Web Server
Just noticed that wordpress.org says it's "Powered By LiteSpeed Web Server". I had never heard of that web server before. I checked the company page and it's advertised as especially fit for Rails and PHP deployment. Has anybody used it in deployment? How does it compare to Ngix/Lighttpd/Apache/etc?
Social media boasting leads to wave of arrests
i agree with your sentiment. however, to nuance it a bit more. if, as you say, "software is now a cornerstone of the world economy. modern life runs through the internet. even if you personally avoid the internet, you depend on it." then it seems more likely that this is a power play. if you can control the means/crutch of modern life then you have tremendous financial, social, and political influence.
How traffic jams are born
No interest in starting a flame-war, but as someone who's just getting going learning to code, I'm curious why you would call Rails an abomination. Can you explain in a way a complete beginner would understand?
SOPA and PIPA were dropped by Congress today
Flash Video Isn't Dead, It Just Pivoted (Why Video.js got a Flash player)
I'm far less worried about government intrusion than I am generally of corporate intrusion. The relationship, as it stands, consists of me willingly giving all my private communications to a third party I have no standing with. I'm questioning my own behavior in that equation much more than any scenario where a government entity serves and act on a warrant. I don't ever expect to be in that position, nor have I, but I have been in the position where my commercial and private correspondents has been violated by companies I am in competition with and employees who I no longer work with. Good luck with the lawsuit, the damage has been done in those situations.
Definitely! My friend swears he's built tolerance for stepping outside of social norms and going for it by watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, then trying to recreate the same social awkwardness in his own life. Not sure that's terribly ideal, but it does appear to be working for him! (Outside of the awkward situations that is, he's been quite successful at breaking into the local music scene in a very short time)
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
things I love about nginx; blazing fast!

things I hate; english community support isn't great.
As much as I'd love to believe it's dead I suspect the real thought process here is "Let's rebrand this turkey." They're going to let people calm down and resubmit the bill next month with a new name.
But they can see that you are not following them, right? I can see everyone who has me in their circles (following). So therefore I can see who has removed me, even if no notification is given.
I would like to see a poll on what fraction of the time Rails developers update app with new versions of Rails. For me, I update about half the time.
At least in terms of public awareness, Wikipedia probably made more of a difference: Total blackout vs. censorship doodle...
This was already correctly posted as a link two days ago when it was new. I don't understand this recent trend of using Ask HN to write essentially blog posts or to repost articles rather than link to them. What is the thought process here?
YC W12 Company Looking for Front-End Design & Dev / UX
We're building a female-focused job platform to help women uncover interesting jobs at new companies, and we're looking for a full-time designer to join our team while we build it out at YCombinator.

About Us: - We launched on TechCrunch in September and are growing like crazy, from 0 to 70,000+ job-seekers in three months - Syndication deals with Forbes, INC, Huffington Post and Business Insider - A seasoned founding team who has been together over a year - YC winter 2012 - Currently generating revenue - Disrupting a $100+ B industry (US alone) - Arianna Huffington & Marissa Mayer are writing blog posts for us

About the Role: - Build the next generation Monster.com (without all the suckiness) - Create the cutting edge in matching individuals to career opportunities based on their background, their browsing habits, and preferences. - Join a tight team that is serious about winning but also has a great time - Flexible compensation includes competitive salary and equity (short-term salary-only option could also be considered)

About You: Excellent eye for visual UI design - 2+ years of professional UX experience - Excited by challenges and the flexibility of a consumer-facing web startup - Extremely detail-oriented, able to define ideas down to a specification level - Skilled in HTML 5, CSS3 to build prototypes - Interactive data visualization experience a plus - Willing and able to learn anything quickly - Un-intimidated by rooms full of smart women. In fact, you should think it's pretty awesome - Live in the San Francisco Bay area or willing to move for at least 3-4 months

Contact us at info@thedailymuse.com with a resume and link(s) to prior work.
That would only work for one-level lists of values, not general data structures like lists inside lists, dictionaries, in arbitrary nesting etc.

It's not really a general serialization solution at all.
How to Get Actionable Data Out of Google Analytics
Financial reform? Use bitcoin. Ask your favorite artists to accept bitcoin purchases or donations.
Exactly. I wouldn't be surprised if a memo went out reading "Distance yourself from the bill for now, we will keep you updated".
Http://2herzen.2h.funpic.de/
No one is making you use iOS.
I'm not surprised. Achievements are another form of positive feedback and in the case of programming, can provide an additional incentive for continuing to code.
You would think so, but I still see new projects started every day using Apache for something nginx would be a much better fit for. I think that mostly the admins and architects on these projects have simply never heard of nginx, or if they have, they don't really know what it does.
I just sent an e-mail to you. There might be other people contemplating starting a service like this, so as somebody who also considered it, I'll post the important parts here:

1. Most teachers are willing to help out students. Why would a student
pay for your service?

2. An obvious answer to the above is "we'll focus on the students that
have teachers that are unwilling to help". From my experience, that's
a small market.

3. You also have to consider that the ones who would be interested in
this service are ones who really want to have a good essay (I'll come
back to this later); the union of the two sets is even smaller. I'm
not entirely sure you would be able to churn profits from just this
subset.

4. Moving beyond teachers, how will you compete with EssayJudge? They
offer an amazing service for nothing. The quality of their service is
hard to beat already, and their price impossible to overcome.

5. How will you vet the quality of your "teachers"? If a student isn't
happy with the response, will you refund the money? What if your
customers are immoral? (I've found that the union of immoral people
and students is quite large.) Looking on HN, I see somebody mentioning "chargebacks"; that would indeed be a big problem.

6. What is your target market? Are you aiming for people who want to
buy ghostwriters, or are you aiming for people who simply want to get
a good grade (from "Doing well on essays is part of doing well in
school, and doing well in school leads to a better life!", that seems
to be your target audience), or are you aiming for people who really
want to improve their writing?
It seems that you're focusing on the penultimate, but is that really a
good decision? Why wouldn't they just hire a ghostwriter instead?

7. An easy answer is "they're pretty good writers already, they just
need that little bit of editing". If so, it looks like you're focusing
on the last group. That's where the money lies, but your advertising
doesn't seem to be targeted towards them.

This is by no means a complete list of the problems you'll face. You should probably have answers to many of these before starting/going forwards though.
alias vim=pico

this is a good approach to vi, as well :P
It's not that the media "tells" you that; though they do. But that's just a reflection of the current state of mind of the populace. People "know" this "fact", that a 3rd partier basically has no chance. I mean, look at Ron Paul. He's completely different from the normal Republican; by all rights he should have been in a separate party. But he wouldn't have gone very far with that. He had to stick with the big party to see it through. The problem is that Republicans and Democrats just have too much power. They have critical mass, and nobody else does.
Also, rather than supporting the MPAA/RIAA industry, try checking out the Blender Foundation, Jamendo, and similar sites that stream or support free content that is licensed under Creative Commons licenses.

And of course, since software is as big an issue as creative content, it should be said that the FSF is having a donation drive currently: https://my.fsf.org/associate/support_freedom
Solution: Eat them.
> So all those folks who always say "memory is cheap" and who make fun of others who write small conservative programs might not be so smart after all.

Your first hint that an opinion comes from a neophyte is that they make fun of others. Your second hint is that they have an un-nuanced worldview.

> Why did Google abandon its plans to supply its own energy?

They didn't. They shut down part of their alternative energy R&D efforts, then turned around and dumped about $100 million into new solar projects. And they've never stopped putting PV panels on their datacenters. Mass media somehow misinterpreted this as an abandonment of some grand strategy by Google.
"Why should I shoot myself in the foot to keep someone else from shooting me in the foot?"

Because sometimes democracy is harder than just doing what you want to do.

"This idea that the root cause of all bad legislation is political donations: it's wrong, and not supported by the data."

Of course bad legislation has no root cause, but money surely contributes. $94MM in contributions last year focused on one issue.

"No one raised more political money in the history of this nation than Barack Obama during his presidential campaign"

I think you're confusing raising campaign money with taking political donations and going out to thousand dollar meals with lobbyists.

"The tech industry, particularly on the Internet entrepreneurial side, has long prided itself on staying out of Washington."

No we haven't, but we've certainly been busy working and trying to ignore it. Plus, they never really came after us directly before.

"IP law is not a winnable war. It is an ongoing negotiation that must be managed forever."

Thats a terribly lazy reason to not protest something. We give them power through direct consumer spending. One great way to reduce that power is to educate each other about where our dollars go.
You can look those up at bls.gov - I'd give a direct link but I'm using a phone right now.
[1] That may be something you'd want to fix about yourself. Just like anything else, you can learn to be socially skilled. The basics are not seeming miserable (who wants to talk to a miserable person?), engaging people, making people feel good about themselves, not complaining, and reflecting all this in body language.

Just like anything else, practice is all it takes. If I were you, I might read some stuff about pickup - because the best way to pick up a girl is to be socially skilled. Those guys have definitely done a lot of research in that arena. Unfortunately it can be a very seedy industry. There was this great article I was going to show you about social vibing, something that was kind of an epiphany for me, but the site (bristollair) seems to have sold its soul.

Basically, the point is you want to be an upper, not a downer.

Anyways, this might be a place to start: http://johnleekuoch.blogspot.com/2010/06/social-vibing.html

Edit: This article is probably better: http://johnleekuoch.blogspot.com/search/label/Social

Also, forgot the biggest shortcut for social skills: smiling! Try to trick yourself into thinking of something that makes you happy/something really funny that makes you laugh inside instead of just moving your muscles. People want to be around happy people!
Microsoft makes it easy to have 3G, 4G, and Wi-Fi connectivity in Windows 8
Apple Textbooks – Not Disruptive
Ok, that article was totally awesome. I have realized the fact that I have difficulty reaching out to people and entities to help me figure out what to do (in general business problems and on technical issues) was something I wanted to work on.

I has just set aside 2 weeks where I was going to focus on this. Then yesterday PG's essay and today this. Time to get started.

Any other good resources out there about this stuff? :)
So to get data into this database, I have to have a Gateway implementation in Java?

Would I have to publish messages to Kafka in my language of choice to avoid writing any Java?
I don't think Grails was much alive (in terms of adoption) at any point in time.

It is as it ever was, there is even a new version out.

You'd be mostly on your own + SpringSource, though, don't expect a Rails/Django sized community, or even a Sinatra or CakePHP sized one...

Groovy itself, the component language, has also lost a lot of core developers and momentum, especially the project lead at most of the language's development:

"In July 2009, Strachan wrote on his blog that "I can honestly say if someone had shown me the Programming in Scala book by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon & Bill Venners back in 2003 I'd probably have never created Groovy."[1] Strachan left the project silently a year before the Groovy 1.0 release in 2007."
Airplanes are usually come up when people are asked for an example of a complex piece of engineering. But rarely do they realize that most complex part of a modern airliner is the software.
I don't. I'd like to, but thats the reason I don't.

If something done for my own good drives me to another product, what does that say about if it is actually for my own good? Thats my problem with the GP's post.
I suspect they will split the functionality of the bill into sub-pieces and and pass each one under a different name or as part of a totally unrelated project.
Apple's mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement
URDU SEX STORIES: Mera Naukar
I thought HN was better than this.
SBT DocBook plugin
If you look at it, Facebook is doing the same thing. Facebook has email & you need to set up a social network account.

Google is turning into a social company and so it needs their users to set up a social network profile.

You can easily choose another email service if you don't like it. This only applies to new users so there's really no lock-in since none of your data are at Google yet.
It seems to me that this solution simply isn't going to work- similar to asking criminals to stop stealing cars/ murdering people.
> I think you're discounting the other benefits of working at a startup vs. a larger company

False dichotomy. There are plenty of smaller non-startup companies that pay well and offer everything else you mention without asking you to gamble your salary on a big payday.
The U.S. government is participatory. It will respond to citizen wishes, but only if citizens actively and continuously make their wishes known.

It is an opportunity cost for industries to be spending their money on lobbying instead of spending their money on R&D that will benefit society. Industries or citizens should not have to be constantly talking to representative in Washington to make sure that they will not do anything wrong when they're not looking.

The U.S. government may be participatory but only the one that shouts the loudest get heard.
>> Grit/Not Quitting

Sometimes though I end up "not quitting" even though all the signs show that I should move on. Its a thin line and I have difficulty accepting that it isn't going to work out.