skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By that logic, cancer is a myth. Do you have any idea how many careers hinge on trying to cure cancer? It's a scientific conspiracy! They have to keep the cancer gravy train going.
My grandfather did a similar thing!

He had an independent uranium geology/prospecting/speculating business in the 70s -- with a bunch of young roughneck employees he would go out with a drill rig to the middle of nowhere on private land, trading a new well to the landowner for the opportunity to take a core sample.

He was making decent money in mining claims, then Three Mile Island happened, and uranium prices dropped through the floor, killing all cash flow. A bunch of the employees effectively became family, practically living with them on little pay.

When uranium prices bounced back in the 90s, my grandfather sold a number of claims (the business's previously-worthless assets), and his old loyal employees who had eventually moved on to paying work got really late 5-figure+ bonuses.
Nice and fine, but here in Europe, in times of satellites, you might sit in another country as your ISP, so the actual location might differ quite a bit.
Nearly 30% of holiday shoppers plan to spend less than last year
I agree with you, but "Your position is irrational and stupid" is abusive, and likely to cause people to believe that you are in the wrong. Which is unfortunate, because in this instance you are right.
I use Debian for most of my servers and the only complaint I really have is that the repos are extremely outdated when compared to Ubuntu. Ubuntu's main strength, at least as I see it, is the fact that the packages are updated more frequently and there are more of them than for on Debian (even Backports).
"What I don't like is when religion joins with theories that can not be reliably tested and scare-mongering under the rubric of science. Then they deny being the pseudo science that they are. Seems like it combines the worst of everything: end-of-days, a call for repentance, smearing the critics, and smarmy self-righteousness."

So what you are saying is that if scientists comment on the apparent societal consequences of their research, it is religion or pseudoscience?

At the same time, if someone who's not a scientist comments on those things, people will say that they are unqualified and doesn't know what they are talking about. That's a nice recipe for making science irrelevant to society, it seems to me.
"Bezos: We are responding to customer needs.

SM: No one asked for the Kindle."

What's wrong with this guy (the interviewer)?

Imagine Bezos answering that question with the following quote:

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said, "Faster horses." -- Henry Ford
True.

Man! I thought they had captured Architeuthis on video.
Got all excited. What a bummer.

Cool vid though.

Edit: A Japanese team actually DID get Architeuthis on video.
The main point about global warming is that it is rapid. Rapid climate change (in either direction) is bad for the obvious reason that we don't have much time to adjust.

In general, a warmer climate is good for us. We're at a geological-historical climate high right now, and it comes with lots of available farm land and pleasant temperatures. Raising it yet further, beyond anything human beings have experienced previously, is projected to bring some good things (Canada will be a huge farm!) and some bad things (malaria will spread its range massively, large increase in hurricanes). Raising it rapidly, however, gets us lots of the latter immediately, and the benefits if any emerge much more slowly.

So should we really be afraid of global warming? On the balance, I think a controlled, intentional warming might be a good idea, although I have no idea who would have the authority to say so or execute on it. Is the current out-of-control, unintended warming dangerous? Almost certainly.
SONY ERICSSON W960 8GB BLACK WALKMAN PHONE (UNLOCKED)
Sony W960 is a tri-band phone that is perfect for the user who wants a sleek and stylish phone with features to match. There really is no better phone for the boardroom. There is an incredible 8 Gigs of storage which means you can lose the mp3 player.
No matter the count, I think HN is pretty perfect as-is. The conversations actually mean something here, it's nothing like digg (thank god!)
phreeze is my pick when django isnt an option
And I have a hunch that high ranking comments gain points exponentially, not linearly.

I'm not sure if that's what I mean -- but some posts seem to get more points just because they already have a lot of points.
Lots of great comments so not much add/kinda like others have said:

When dealing direct with vendors (Dell, Sun and IBM from experience):

1) Price you're given is not only based on current purchase, but future purchase. Telling your sales rep 'I need X servers now, but I expect to need a further X per quarter growing to X after X time' then they'll fight harder for your business. Basically, present your business as a growth opportunity to the vendor.

2) When speaking to your first sales rep, ask at what price/order level they generally deal in. The reps who handle bigger clients have access to bigger discounts.

3) Don't under or over-specify your machines without calculating your later options. Buying an extra processor for one machine now will be a hell of a lot cheaper/easier than buying the matching processor in 3/6/12 months. In the same respect, not buying that extra processor now might be more prudent because a new chassis with the latest and greatest processor in 6/12/24 months might be a better option. (should be part of your scalability predictions anyway).

4) Know your stuff.

4.1) We all know reps bs, by knowing what you're talking about you can reduce this tedium.

4.2) If you ask which processor is better, then it'll always be the more expensive one (or more importantly, the one with the better margin for them which is not always the most expensive).

4.3) mmmurf said it, but to re-iterate. Time = Money. If a rep is holding your hand too much, then you won't get as good deals.

5) Know your vendor and their enemies.
5.1) When is there end of quarter?
5.2) How have they done compared to comparable vendors over the last quarter, year, etc?
5.3) Which vendors are pushing X line/type of servers at the moment?
5.4) Have comparison quotes.

6) Specify a date when you will be looking to purchase. 5.1 has a MASSIVE impact on this.
Ah, you're right. I forgot it doesn't mention Omega. However, at least they're related concepts!
pg, was that 12k # of accounts? Just double checking. I love the fact that we're a small community. 18k views a day is really good for the number of users
Wasn't there also some article about how people don't get dumber as they get older, rather, their focus is less and less?

Sort of strange, but if that and all of this really turn out to be true, extending the human lifespan might not be as difficult as we make it out to be.
There have been small high-quality screens available for some time -- the Fujitsu P-series laptops had extremely nice 10.2" 1280x768 screens (I had a P2120).

At least the netbook vendors stopped trying to use $8 DVD Player screens (7" 800x480), and moved to 9" & 10" 1024x600 screens. There are a few netbooks out with 1280x800 screens.

My biggest problem is the shitty style of keyboards that are so popular in east asia -- my Fujitsu had one, the EEE keyboards are a perfect example: Irregular keyshapes, odd staggering, arrow keys that displace the right-shift, too-big/no F-keys, shitty keyfeel, flexy support, etc.

The only netbooks I've seen with good keyboards have been the Acer/HP models, though they have the odd touchpads.
Google Groups is not an archival service. Anybody can delete their own messages if they have their email account linked to their Google account. The list admin can delete messages for any reason.
instead of an email, this should be a firefox extension...this way you know right away when the site is up
MIT to Open Source Mobile Web Code
What Would Keynes Have Done?
The evidence that cancer exists is pretty conclusive. The evidence that the climate is changing in an unusual way isn't.

I live in England, wet, dark miserable England - yet in Roman times there were vineyards and olive trees here. Are you going to tell me next that the bad old Roman Empire was emitting clouds of toxic waste?
I bet it breaks on google reader, and similar browser-based feeds.
It was a dig at the Wall Street types who manipulate symbols of value (i.e. money) without creating real wealth themselves.

Of course manipulating symbols in the wider sense can create wealth - we're hackers, right? ;-)
"The evidence that cancer exists is pretty conclusive. The evidence that the climate is changing in an unusual way isn't."

I don't agree with that statement, but it's a valid argument for a climate skeptic. "The scientists are just trying to keep the gravy train going" is not a valid argument, because it applies equally to all heavily researched areas. So please, don't use that specific argument again, and understand why it is incorrect.

Any debate on England and Rome is entirely beside the point.
The MySQL people or the Sun people?
"Subversion works. It's well-documented, simple, and there are many tools that work with it. Tell me why it's an inappropriate choice for a "working and current toolchain"."

Because it is not a distributed version control system. As more and more people use a dvcs, they realize how incredibly flexible, useful, and generally more powerful it is vs. a centralized vcs.

There is clear value added on numerous levels over subversion. You simply haven't bothered to research it.

"Not wanting to learn the version-control flavor of the week is a very different thing than not knowing how to use version control -- and it's suggestive that you've so confused the two concepts."

Git is not a flavor of the week. It is emerging as the dominant contender after literally 2 years of fighting and evolving for superiority within the dvcs community. This field is not new. It's suggestive of how out-of-date your information is that you aren't aware of these.

"Being a professional is more about judicious decision making than it is about raw knowledge of technology."

Yes. And I'm directly saying that you're making poor professional decisions. DVCS isn't fad anymore, it's the new standard.
I think that unless you give me $1 million, the earth will explode and kill everyone. Better to err on the side of caution. ;-)
Cuberick: Syntax Highlighting In Blogger
Or we're finding out how useless they were all along. The web allows us to dig for what -we- find important; -we- become the editors. And that will keep stupid people stupid, but allow smart people to become much smarter.
People need an excuse?

Edit: On a more serious note, this is nothing new. MySQL has had bugs and an insane amount of gotchas ever since it was released. Admittedly, every software product has some gotchas but compare the irregularities of MySQL against a comparable product, say PostgreSQL, and MySQL is significantly worse. Combine that with what used to be the developer's disdain for ACID and ANSI SQL standards and there have always been very good reason to never start using MySQL in the first place. Furthermore, MySQL still has inferior support for transactions, views, constrints, etc. compared to other databases and has absolutely atrocious multi-core and multiuser performance.
This is a chaotic and cynical interview.
Twitter API Wiki Hacked?
Demo page is included to the distribution.
The interviewer is an asshole,

"Your handlers said I could only talk to you about Kindle but that you wouldn't give specifics on its sales. That sounds paranoid."

"Amazon has about 6 percent of all U.S. sales online. That's huge. Why muck it up with all the other businesses you've added, like manufacturing [the Kindle] and your new customer-service software?"

Totally unprofessional and if I were the editor I would be embarrassed to publish this piece of shit. Just publishing Bezos's answers would be better than seeing the way SmartMoney's interview asked the questions.
Best. Shell. Ad. Ever.
Ask HN: List of Hacker Blogs?
I'm playing around with memetrackers and looking for interesting "scenes" to create trackers for. I've rolled a few so far with interesting results and would like to make one for hacker blogs (blogs written by hackers).

Usually, I surf around and pull sites from blogrolls. And I'll do that here, but who's got the best blogrolls for these sorts of blogs?

Also, if you're a hacker and have a blog, feel free to post your RSS feed URL below. It takes about 30 minutes to make a new tracker once I've got all the feeds together. If it turns out to be interesting, I'll share the URL on here to see what you all think.
If I Started Today
OOPS and The Platypus Effect
I meant these particular guys.
Those public universities are great. You have nothing to worry about. Pay no attention to those damned U.S. News rankings or anybody else.

Apply to the private schools if you want; I got a great deal and a great education at CWRU (which is CMU but in a different Midwestern rust-belt city). All else being equal, though, I'd go to the school that puts you in the smallest amount of debt. Once you're out of the realm of the DeVrys, and you've applied to schools with more than two or three professors teaching in your intended major, one undergraduate education is much like another. The key variable is yourself, the availability of at least a few other smart people, and a library. And now that the Web has been invented, points two and three are less important -- you can watch MIT lecturers, read MIT textbooks, and chat with MIT students and alumni over the web for free.

Other considerations worth mentioning: Do the students in your intended major seem happy? Can you stand the neighborhood and the weather and the social scene? Do the undergrads get to do any research or do the profs and grad students just hold them at arm's length?

If you're worried that you'll need a prestige degree later on in life, in case you want to be elected President or teach at Oxford or something, you can just apply to prestigious grad schools. The smart-shopping academic snob knows that after two years in a Harvard masters' program you can call yourself a Harvard grad instead of an Ohio State grad. Just work hard and get good grades...
Scientists are not a single homogenous group. If a tenured meteorologist says the climate is changing, then we should listen. If someone tacked "effects of global warming on..." to their study on "the mating habits of water voles", something that would not otherwise have been funded, then we should be skeptical if that person's name later shows up as one of the scientists supporting the global warming theory.

Channel 4 did a documentary on this phenomenon not long ago.
I use this plugin:

http://fazibear.googlepages.com/blogger.html

It uses SyntaxHighlighter:

http://code.google.com/p/syntaxhighlighter/
Strange that he didn't put himself at the pinnacle of the pyramid. Lebedev is a successful businessman and a relentless self-promoter, but he is widely despised in Russian design circles as a designer. His f#ck-you-all attitude (clearly demonstrated by the poster) doesn't help matters either.
My problem is that they're largely inferior to a small regular laptop, yet cost more.

It's like getting a MacBook vs Air. I'm sorry, the Air is nice and is exactly what I need it for, but for $1000 fucking dollars I'll take the extra 2 lbs of weight. I mean jesus christ, the appeal is for people traveling and overweight charges on airlines aren't that expensive.
This theory of a binary opposition between autism and schizophrenia, explained as a tug-of-war between maternal and paternal genes, strikes me as grossly simplistic. Notice how, in the second-last paragraph, the author evades the question of how then a single person can have both disorders. He also glosses over the well-known fact that schizophrenia (as well as autism) is more common in men.

The theory is surprisingly reminiscent of older models about schizophrenia that traced its cause to mothers. Nowadays, I suppose, we reimagine the family drama in genes and call it "symbolic".

The theory does have the property of being perfectly suitable for science journalism, no doubt a significant advantage for a meme.
A patent, meaning 7 years from now they'll be able to pay $100,000 to wait 2-3 years for a 50/50 shot in court.
Bezos took it in stride, he seemed to remain calm despite the idiotic line of inquiry.
We're all just sock-puppets of eight original users. Wasn't it obvious?
Is It Time to Buy Google Shares?
I'll bet you're studying CS. That's your mistake.

Change majors. Physics. Biology. Statistics. Graphic Arts. Take MechE and weld together some solar-powered cars. Take EE and learn to build your own microcircuits (it's fun!). If your major isn't hard or interesting enough find something that is.

There are schools where CS is a challenging major filled with bright students and interesting problems. Or so I am told by folks from MIT, and I have to trust them, because I've never seen it myself. I went to a decent engineering school, but even there CS was a major for the cube drones of the future, with the smart CS students in the minority, huddling together for mutual support and doing most of their real work and learning outside of class. I didn't fight that. I just took one look and left. There were physics problems to be solved.

You can always work in CS without a CS major. Believe me. I did a physics B.S. and a Ph.D. in EE, took exactly two official courses in software in my life, and I can't seem to stay out of the field even when I've tried. Keep CS as a minor or just drop it entirely and rely on self-teaching, which you seem to enjoy anyway.

Learn something hard or something important. Higher math. Statistics. Linguistics. Take some history and practice your writing. Take an accounting course. Take an econ course. If nothing else, work on your startup in your spare time, but have some fun while you can! Your soul-killing cubicle-drone job will wait for you, I promise!

Don't leave now, for god's sake. There's a recession on, and thousands of people are probably trying to figure out how to get back into school to ride out the storm. You are where many people want to be! If you're running out of money transfer to a cheaper school and keep the debt as low as possible, but don't leave unless you've got no other choice.
Mere Symbol-Manipulator is going on my next batch of business cards.
It's a lot easier to learn social engineering, which is an important life skill, in college than any where else.
I wondered if F-1 or any other non-resident status allows you to own a part of a company or a profitable company. Could you please elaborate about that?
The ones collected in my rss reader after years, as hackers in the general sense, not just security:

http://blawg.72dpiarmy.com/

http://arduino.cc/blog/

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/arduino/

http://events.ccc.de/

http://chaosradio.ccc.de/chaos_tv.html

http://chaosradio.ccc.de/chaosradio_international.html

http://charlie137-2.blogspot.com/

http://www.flylogic.net/blog/

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/

http://ha.ckers.org/blog/

http://har2009.org/

http://neil.fraser.name/

http://www.nycresistor.com/

http://schulzeandwebb.com/blog/

http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/

http://thepiratesdilemma.com/

http://the-shoebox.org/

Good luck, looking to see your memetracker ;)
Yes, startups make their job better than big companies. But I think that it is a part of a more general rule: people work productively in OPEN systems, and the open systems themselves encourage working hard. Open source projects are developed more rapidly, because it is hard to imagine the system which is more open. Both users and developers control the system, and every user can become a developer. In startups we have a limited number of people who can control the process of development, but they still controll it. In other words, the system is open for founders and employees. Big companies work unefficiently because they are too closed, and a great number of checks is only a part of it.
I totally disagree. This was a smart interviewer setting the tone early - one, the interviewer appealed to Bezos' ego to get the PR handler's rules dismissed (win - Jeff answered questions about AWS) and made it clear that PR answers wouldn't be acceptable (fail - Jeff was remarkably on message).

Interviewers are supposed to get interesting answers out of their subjects. Being combative and having a point of view are tactical decisions, not a sign of being unprofessional.

(As an aside, Sarah Lacy's fawning over Zuck was a tactic that failed. It also might have worked if it wasn't up on stage in front of everyone. Different tactics work for different interviewers and different subjects in different settings and times.)
Share! Would love to check your memetracker out!
According to the article, the Sun people didn't have much to do with the GA release.
here is the rss feed to my blog (french/english):

http://alexgirard.com/rss.xml
the person who made that must be a real smart ass...
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/188991/which-programming-...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/195689/what-developer-blo...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/78955/what-are-the-best-p...
Pyjamas: Build AJAX Apps in Python
New Genetic Test Asks Which Sport a Child Was Born to Play
Sadly, the LAMP stack has reached canonical status. To alter any portion of it is to depart from the standard and embark on a never-ending uphill hike.

For example, nearly every Drupal module is developed against MySQL and then ported to PostgreSQL as an afterthought. Half of them have nothing but a big //FIXME where the PostgreSQL CREATE TABLE statements are supposed to be. And Drupal has actually made a big, occasionally controversial effort to remain DB-agnostic, to create and use an abstract database API, and to explicitly require every bit of core code to work and be tested under PostgreSQL. I'd guess that a lot of other PHP projects are far more tightly bound to MySQL.

Having said that, this article gives me fond thoughts of ripping MySQL off my servers and running aptitude install postgres.
Possibly because McDonalds affects you directly and global warming is more of a Tragedy of the Commons situation.
"We launched our Web services two years ago; it's the equivalent of creating an electric grid, but for computing. Recently, I went to Luxembourg and visited a 300-year-old brewery. It had this gigantic relic of a generator from when it had to make its own electricity. As soon as they could buy off-grid, they did. Making their own electricity didn't make their beer taste better. It's the same for running your own data center."

Awesome analogy. I don't understand why so many people want to host their own services. Stick to your core business.
Update from Pixel Qi (the company behind the OLPC screen)