skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can save a lot of money by going with the sales guy. Just be sure he knows that you are growing and you'll be placing a big order every few months.

First go to the Dell website and price out the equipment. Then when you're speaking to the sales guy, tell him you priced it out on the website and it came out to about 88% of the actual price the site gave you.

Then tell him you've heard that talking to the sales guy is the way to start a business relationship and that you were hoping he could quote it out for you. Tell him you're ready to make the purchase decision immediately but the pricing has to make sense. Tell him the pricing on the website looks like it's marked up quite a bit.

It may take him a day or more to generate the quote.

Be aware that he has tremendous room to wiggle on some items, but not on others. Last order I placed the salesman could discount heavily some items but not others. You don't really care as long as the overall price makes sense. So when you eventually go over the quote with him, be sure to focus on your "budget" for the equipment, and not on where the specific pricing comes from.

You should also have a simultaneous dialog like this going with a rep from any other companies you'd buy from.

To the salesperson, the equation is effort vs time. If he knows you're ready to buy soon, then he has every incentive to make you a good deal b/c in a day the sale will be made and so he'll be willing to take a small commission in exchange for a quick sale. He has some constraints about how he can price items, but has a lot of flexibility on price.

If you're buying 10 to 20 servers you should be looking at least a 25% discount off of the website price. The only reason they publish those prices is to give the salesperson a starting point to work down from (or to sucker naive shoppers into paying full price via the web).

You want to come across as decisive and ready to buy at all times, if only he can solve the "issues with the pricing".

Frankly Dell's sales process stinks, and it is annoying to have to work with some of the salespeople there. But I've saved a substantial amount of money over the web prices by negotiating with them, so it's worth it.

You may also be able to save money by modifying some of the configurations slightly, b/c Dell lets salespeople discount based on the need to move inventory.

Don't be afraid to tell the salesperson it's OK if he needs to ask permission from his manager to make the deal, but that you're eager to get the order placed today. Tell him he can put you on hold while he speaks to the manager.

Good luck!
It's also kind of ad hominem. Al Gore doesn't live a life of saint renunciation, therefore, global warming is a hoax.

I really see no connection.
Sport pilots and Light sport planes still fall under FAA rules and still require fairly extensive flight training and certification.
Well... The measurements are recent ;-)
Your fundamental assumption is totally wrong. You simply cannot calculate the signature once and then store it and use it forever after, even for static content. That leaves you open to a whole class of attacks from a simple replay on up. To protect yourself, you'd need at minimum a nonce supplied by the client per request.

You've given no thought to exactly what the signature would be over, nor how having one or more untrusted caches between you and the client might affect the content. If you think you can merely sign the payload, not the headers, think again. Where exactly do cookies live? What effect can the status line have on a client's behaviour? Now ask yourself, what are caches allowed to do a request without stepping outside the bounds of the standard? Yes, exactly.

You haven't addressed at all how the client would even get hold of the public key needed to verify the signature. You haven't addressed what the signature is over in the event the server uses some content encoding like gzip, or the chunked encoding. You don't even add the obvious and trivial optimisation that the signature would be best sent as a trailer rather than a header, neither do you define the behaviour if the server wishes to send trailer fields after the HTTP payload.

The only thing that can be concluded from this is that you don't really understand security or indeed HTTP. I'm baffled by the attitude that you admit you don't know anything about these topics, but you're trying contribute something to the field anyway. This is completely arse backwards, and in no other field of endeavour would anyone even consider tolerating it. Would a peer reviewed biology journal look kindly on me if I sent them my thoughts on protein folding? I think not.

The attitude that any software engineer can do security is prevalent in the industry and gets us in to ridiculous amounts of trouble. You wouldn't believe how many software and hardware products I've seen that are completely broken security wise thanks to this. If you're interested in the field, I'd suggest starting by reading the canonical introductory text, Secrets and Lies .(http://www.schneier.com/book-sandl.html) This is not a field anyone is going to thank you if you want to learn on the job.
The cost of the checks should balance the cost of the risks. Those are not always determinate or exactly estimable, but, statistically, that would be a simple basis of a rational approach. Wouldn't it?
Oh forgot one thing. You should expect to get free shipping on an order that size. When it gets to the last negotiation then you can say "Ok, I'll do it if you can get me free 2 day shipping on it".
Imagine if, say, an Amazon customer service rep actually yelled, screamed, and abused a customer calling about his order.

A single individual - one who is not even in a high position. But you bet your buttons that it'll be all over the internet within ours.

Sure, it probably wouldn't even cause a blip to the stock price, but it's a huge amount of harm for a single person to cause.

I once worked for a company where anybody can push changes to prod without much feedback whatsoever. Certain more senior guys watched the commit logs for any obvious shenanigans or idiocy, but generally changes were within customers' hands within a day or two (and this was a desktop app!). They suffered some horrifying stability problem for a while that necessitated some new policies. It was certainly liberating to work in that environment, but I can see why many places have safeties in place.
Climate engineering is a very interesting idea, but since we don't understand the climate very well, I would start with small steps and leave setting off volcanoes or dumping iron into the seas for a future moment.

We have one planet to experiment with and we will have to live in it for the foreseeable future. Until that changes, I will favor lower-energy experiments.

And, BTW, the whole idea of reducing carbon footprint, building more efficient cities, transportation and generally living consuming less resources is a great idea in itself. Remember, by the next 100 years, we will have a whole lot more people hanging around.
This is what I call "playing defense" instead of "playing offense". By nature, the people at large companies are more concerned with risk aversion than innovation. This is also how managers like to "hold power" over the real innovators by controlling the change management process. What makes a manager more qualified to deploy to production than the programmer?
> .. a persuasive argument that you seem to believe.

What was uncovered were the facts demonstrating severe climate changes in ancient times. This requires no believing in, merely accepting that archeologists didn't fake their findings.
They should run tests on hackers comparing ones with access to HN and ones without.
If you are swimming and one person says "nice tan" and the other screams "shark!", I would strongly advise you to pay attention to the second one.
The only plausible explanation -- and Occam's razor will back me up on this -- is that there's a large black monolith buried underground at the location of the anomaly that has the same proportions as a monolith that will soon be discovered near Jupiter. We were supposed to discover it seven years ago. Better late than never I guess.
Well... If we had the means to stop a supernova, we would probably have the means to stop global warming.

Or turn it on during winter. ;-)
Perhaps my M was worn out, but it required so much force to press the keys that I got in the habit of pressing them hard, on any keyboard even w/o positive click.

I never had a problem with finding it ambiguous whether a key actually got pressed before using the M, except on ultra cheapo keyboards made in the early 90s.

Before I used the M I'd type with soft, smooth motions. Typing on a well designed computer keyboard bears no resemblance to pounding on an old fashioned mechanical typewriter, which is (I believe) what the M was trying to mimic.
As holiday season closes in, e-books exploding in popularity
The author also seems to have an interesting course on astronomy and culture:

We will look at questions like: How is the date of Chinese New Year determined? Why do the Muslim and Chinese months start on different days? Will the Moon ever look like it does on the Singapore flag? What date of the year is the earliest sunrise in Singapore? How did ancient sailors navigate?

http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/aslaksen/teaching/heavenly.html
Poll: CS, music, or math - which major produces better programmers?
I've heard/read in a couple places that studying music and math creates better programmers than studying computer science. For those of you who've seen the code produced by people from all of these backgrounds, which major, if any, seems to produce the programmers who write the best code?

I've seperated music and math since there may be a difference between those two as well.
Supermicro servers have served me very well. All of our clusters at engineyard.com are built on supermicro 1u's with 32gig ram and 8cores. Highly recommended.
I have used Topica (defunct) and YahooGroups (aka Onelist) before. Not used Google Groups. YahooGroups is AFAIK most likely to last and archive another 10 years. Google Groups != trust.
Those are quality assurance issues, not customer service. Both factor into your satisfaction with a product, but they are not the same thing. Even though the ideal is both, it's entirely possible to have great QA but shitty CS, or shitty QA and great CS, and still have happy and loyal customers. It's impossible (or at least extremely impractical) to have perfection in either.

This story is about a positive customer service experience, where 1) the service person lacked a prescribed solution to the original (firmware/screen) problem, but the customer left satisfied and 2) the service person was attentive enough to solve a second problem (out of warranty, at company expense) that the customer hadn't even expressed as a complaint.

If you can't see why that's uncommonly good service, you're not paying attention.

Of course it's not that way all the time, at every location, for every customer, but it indicates Apple's atypical strategy of having their own retail stores with that kind of one-on-one support is one that can have atypically big pay off in customer satisfaction.

For comparison, Best Buy's GeekSquad would have charged the customer a minimum of $50 to even look at the problem, and on the off chance they even knew about the recalled battery, would not have been able to replace the it on the spot for free. Local shops are mostly the same story. In short, the author could not have had had the same loyalty-generating positive experience with any other brand of computer.
Krugman writes:

I think the thesis of the Monetary History has just taken a hit.

However, Anna Schwartz, one of the authors of the Monetary History tome has already stated publicly that she thinks that Bernanke is fighting the "last war" (i.e. the Great Depression)

http://www.dailypaul.com/node/69560
this is something i need a video to understand properly
"My current apartment is only a few hundred feet from the Castro downtown and is around $1200 for a 1000sqft 2 bedroom apartment."

You got a really, really, good deal. Before I moved out here, I looked at numerous tiny 1 bedroom places that were $1275-$1400 and I considered them unlivable. And, when my rent went up by $150 on the house I live in now, I shopped around again. I'm just not seeing prices anywhere near what you're paying for that kind of space. And, I've been pleasantly surprised to find that housing in the city is not that much more expensive...maybe $100 or $200 more per month, for the locations I'm shopping in.
Here's the deal I've currently arranged with Telus. This is after much haggling as well as the fact I've been a customer for 3 years already. The deals OK, but nothing like in the states. The thing that really pisses me off is the system access fee!

19.3 - 200 daytime mintues, unlimited evenings @ 5pm & unlimited weekends // $7 - 2500 text // $25 - unlimited data // $15 - unlimited long distance (Canada + US) // free - unlimited incomning // free - vm3 / call display

Plan Total: $66.3

Plus: $7.5 - System access fee // $.5 - 911 fee // $3.72- Tax

Grand Total: $77.30
There is a bit more attached to those statements you picked out.
What we need is for both sides in these kinds of controversies to nominate their best spokesperson and have them participate in publicized debates.
Not just in global warming, but in all areas of public controversy. Hopefully this would lead to much less balkanized discourse. Plus, it would help both sides respond to the other much more civilly and tolerantly since people would no longer feel so much at war with each other.
I was thinking 1U because I don't need a lot of disk and it gives me more options about how many I can put in each cage. What kind of power limitations have you run into?

As for the disk, I just don't have a lot to store.
Hm, true...
For VillageToolbox.com, I needed a database driven mailing list with a highly customizable web interface, both for subscribe and list options, and for the list archives.

I ended up writing my own mailet for Apache JAMES. It seems pretty robust so far, but hasn't seen heavy traffic yet.
Beginning Ruby From Novice To Professional by Peter Cooper
On the other hand, saying "I know I'll get downmodded for this, but..." is a sure way to get upmodded:)
Some things that PG didn't make explicit: web applications can have an extraordinarily tight feedback loop between customer and coder. Multiple revisions per day are easy, especially if any single user's data is rather low-value. Many a startup of this kind has zoomed past its corporate competitors simply by iterating faster. If your product is embedded firmware for a home security device, this strategy is just not available.

But here's another twist: when you start working for a giant company that provides myriad services under the same login, suddenly everyone has to move as slowly as the slowest part of the business. It doesn't matter if you are just doing Yippee! Backgammon, because who knows -- maybe you could somehow accidentally expose the data at Yippee! Payment Solutions.

This is a completely rational consequence of being a giant company and delivering multiple web services under the same login. It is possible to have slightly different authentication policies for each service. But I wonder if OpenID providers have thought about this enough.
That's a good point. Lots of the factoids about rich people don't say anything about all the people who used those approaches. So, besides things like common sense and intuition, it is hard to get a statistically accurate idea about the correlation between the methods and their users' success.
"Microsoft has filed patents for technology that monitors the heart rate, blood pressure, galvanic skin response, facial expressions of office workers, and even their brain waves.

The idea, the patents say, is to let managers know if workers are experiencing heightened frustration or stress."

Consultant to Boss: As you can see on this graph compiled from brainwave data, your employees are experiencing heightened frustration from the fact we're monitoring their brainwaves.
Great information -- thanks!
I don't think so... I found one on craigslist just a few minutes ago, $1450 for 900 sqft 2 bedroom in Mountain View. Unless you require your apartment complex to have a pool with workout rooms and all kinds of amenities, you can find decently cheap stuff. Just go here: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/apa/ and select Mountain View. You'll see the prices aren't too far off my current price.
What was your favorite flavor?
Pyjamas: build AJAX apps in Python (like Google did for Java)
This article makes 3 very valid points about the way Canada is currently viewing the digital area in such a backwards way. There's other examples of CRTC negligence such as when they mandated the creation of a "Canadian" HBO since for some reason we couldn't get the stream directly from the US.

In the States they also have fiber installations going directly into the houses and I haven't even heard of anything like that here in Canada. ADSL has a "Max" package of 6mbps which is laughable, while the cable operator (Shaw) has one that's 25mbps however they charge $100/month! And that's just for Internet! This is the biggest annoyance to me personally as Canada used to be a leader in broadband availability but we've stayed with the same speed structure for the last 5+ years and are falling faster and faster behind the leading nations.

With the new frequencies available for wireless bandwidth hopefully we'll see some new competition in the cell phone sector as it's desperately needed!
Programmers are unlike many types of workers in that the best ones actually prefer to work hard. This doesn't seem to be the case in most types of work. When I worked in fast food, we didn't prefer the busy times. And when I used to mow lawns, I definitely didn't prefer it when the grass was long after a week of rain.

Programmers, though, like it better when they write more code. Or more precisely, when they release more code. Programmers like to make a difference. Good ones, anyway.

Salesman like it best when they can sell more. When I used to sell used cars, I loved it best when I could keep pushing cars out of the lot.

Writers like it best when they can write more. They like it best when their imagination can produce thousands of stories.

The difference is that coders usually know what they will tackle and have a strategy so it is easier for them to get to the end point. Also they are almost sure they will hit the end point of a certain problem.

With other professions you cannot predict much. Your next customer is not guaranteed, your next story just does not want to show up in your brain etc....

That being said, Yes, a lot of programmers I know work hard.
20 questions game that works astonishingly well
it doesn't matter, merit can't buy passion
Another HP story. Not nearly on the scale you're talking about, but the company I works for uses HP DL360 G5's as the hardware they sell to customers. Before we ship to customers, we open the box and install software and such. As a tester/engineer for this software, I've never seen a dead DL360 arrive. Yes, the shipping containers are huge. HP's iLO2 software (integrated lights-out) is excellent.

Also, whatever machine you get, make sure you buy some extra rails and hardware. Store the extras somewhere and label them with the date purchased and which systems they are for.
http://cache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpic...
I understand that Paul Krugman (the author of the article) didn't try to claim more than that the thesis of the Monetary History has just taken a hit, and that the target audience of the news item might not have the attention span for a longer more details argument. However, this kind of blog post encapsulates some of what frustrates me about economics, and in particular, economists.

Just from my fairly uneducated (in economics) viewpoint, this is what Krugman's post basically looks like.

a) The Fed has been much more aggressive about expanding the monetary base the last few years than from the start of the Great Depression through 1933.
b) This doesn't seem to be working.

Problem is - there's no explanation whatsoever for why such an action may or may not help. There's no explanation for why it's legitimate to compare mid 1929 through early 1933 to late 2003 through late 2008. After all, there were CLEARLY some problems with the economy by the end of 1929, whereas I don't really think you could say it was anything like that in late 2003 (sure didn't seem that way to me). There's no explanation for why we should assume that the multitude of other variables (such as the collective behavior of society in 1929 versus that of 2008) that affect a situation like this, don't affect it enough that we can imply that we can look at Federal expansion of the monetary base as draw conclusions like we normally do about an isolated variable in a scientific environment. I'm sure Krugman doesn't think it's an isolated variable, but the whole thing is written in a way that kind of implies that. Plus, this is all just speculation as of this moment - while we are in the midst of a mini-depression at the moment, we are a long ways away from it being comparable to the Great Depression. While we're getting closer to that point, it's probably still premature to say that Federal efforts thus far have been wholly unsuccessful. All we basically know is that aggressively expanding the monetary base is not a one shot magic bullet that can singlehandedly prevent an economic downturn.

Ugh, reminds me of my mini-minor (a Humanities thing at my school) in economics, which I regret choosing to this very day, especially in that the blog gives me a taste of what could be a compelling, well thought out argument, but never gets there.
It's amazing how many people think that flashy and fancy is more important than common sense which those 10 points were all about!
This is a very big problem to address -- the idea of excessive consumerism is so deeply embedded into our social structure and mentality that it is hard to get away from even when you are conscious of it.

I drive a car made in 2002, which is kind of beat up (people hit me in parking lots and I dont repair dings/dents). The engine is working perfectly. But I regularly get comments from people asking me if I'm shopping for new cars. Its such a sin in some circles to have a 4+ year old car that these people think they are doing me a favor by reminding me its time to upgrade.

America is going to have to really come to a point of real peril before the attitudes of most people will switch. The good news, I suppose, is that if we arent there now, we will be soon.
If Silverlight were installed just as often as Flash, would you use it over Flash?
If not, why?
Not a video, but a helpful image:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Moon_traj...
You do need to actually ask for money, or put a price on it. Until then, the difficulty of monetizing is largely undefined.
I am amazed at the amount of data that had to be collected for this to correctly guess 5 for 5 of my characters. some of them were kind of obscure too. I wonder if they didn't crowd-source it some how.

edit: with the first incorrect guess of seven, i get it. they are crowd-sourcing the data every time it loses. brilliant.
Startup Diary - Day 3 - Subtle changes