skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The phrase "living wage" is loaded to start with. I'm sure there are political motivations here.

However, when I ran their calculations for my town, I was surprised to get a number very close to what we had already figured out as our minimum "comfortable" budget. No, we wouldn't die on less money, but the cuts would have to come someplace painful, like dropping health insurance for me and my wife, or eating a lot more potatoes and a lot less meat and vegetables.

If you wanted to rephrase the concept to "minimum stable middle class income", they were right on, at least in our case.
Sun to cut up to 6,000 workers, 18 pct of staff
In the interview you mentioned that your monthly burn rate was “in the low four figures". Does that include salaries for your team? Just curious what your cost breakdown is, how much of that goes towards servers, etc (if you don't mind revealing that).
Anecdotal evidence is my favorite flavor of evidence.
Not to be picky, but since you're interested in EE, I'll tell you: mA is units of current (charge/time). Coulomb (C) is a unit of charge.
Yes - stipends. We have enough for food, rent, shitty health care insurance, internet, etc.

I'll write about everything once we're further down the line.
If the purpose of marriage is to encourage procreation, then heterosexually couples who take advantage of the legal benefits of marriage (tax deductions, hospital visitation, Social Security survivor's benefits, etc., etc., etc.) without procreating are freeloaders. So let's amend the laws so that only a heterosexual couple that has produced a child can take advantage of those benefits. (Not adoption, and not artificial insemination by a third-party donor! That's cheating!)

There's a very practical suggestion. If I lived in California I'd be tempted to put it on a referendum and see how many votes it loses by.
I doubt much technical work is being done in arabic. It seems like most work is done in English. I think Arabic is a good language to learn just because of the number of speakers. And of course it will make business easier in middle eastern countries.
Not nothing, but not sitting on doves. This use of polarization does not add much. It now appears that his startup is now a lifestyle business, a shift worth congratulating and celebrating. Celebrate each success, and when the party is over, dust off your shoulders and get back to work. But you have to make sure to celebrate, for the sake of your own motivation. (Well, you may not need to, but in general, "one" should.)
What’s so hard about monetizing Facebook?
Gadgets that operate over television frequencies promise to transform the wireless...
Fold, of course (just like I mentioned). Scrunching is for people who don't mind getting their hands dirty.

I do.
Ask HN SanFran: Is there a Micro Center Equivalent in the city?
I moved to the Mission from Cambridge and am looking for a local place for basic needs like RAM, etc. Cambridge had Micro Center which was awesome and had great prices.

Is there something here better than BestBuy? Thanks!
Music recoginition software vs. music mashups
Chandrayaan-I Impact Probe lands on moon
Paper: Pig Latin: A Not-So-Foreign Language for Data Processing
Direct link to the paper:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~olston/publications/sigmod08.pdf
I didn't file a bug report because I'm not entirely sure what I would file it as; "Excessive use of magic?".

What happened in my case is that when using multiprocessing with Django, if a database connection is opened by the main process to make a query that connection is kept open and workers end up using it instead of spawning their own. If I manually close the connection, they all make their own. This isn't sufficient, however, because global imports related to transaction support still manage to step on each other when queries are run concurrently. This turns out to be a pretty rare race condition, but it does happen.

You can read more at the comment here, including my workarounds: http://ericholscher.com/blog/2008/nov/10/announcing-django-c...
You've probably got your answer already: Everybody needs something to work for, and if you don't have anything in particular to work for, money is the default.
He needs to get some users to do the support for him via forums etc.

If he can build a community of "experts" that give advice (think rails or django here) regularly and help out new users he can answer this question by pointing to the "exceptional community that exists to help".
Good article p. And congrats on your success.
" I don't want a state constitution that can be changed in such a meaningful way by a "fifty plus one" majority."

Then amend the constitution, if it is so "trivial."

$25M from LDS really helped the pro-Prop 8 lobby. The amount of dramatic fear mongering that went on was staggering (Teachers will be forced to make your kids queer! If gays get married, your marriage is worthless!)

Fundamentally, there is no argument against gay marriage that does not involve religion. Separation of church and state and equal protection under the law together will make this a SCOTUS issue, IMHO. IANAL.
I was just in the Toscanini's this article speaks of a couple weeks ago, and they didn't have tutti frutti ice cream.

19 years ago, I saw an episode of "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" in which Ozzie goes on a desperate search for tutti frutti ice cream. Ozzie found it. Thus far, I have not. My research suggests that tutti frutti (also known as "frozen pudding") is readily available in Massachusetts, so when I was in Cambridge for a week last month, I fully expected to find it.

Toscanini's didn't have it. Brigham's website claims they make frozen pudding from September through December, but when I stopped in at the Brigham's parlor near the Free Software Foundation in Boston, the rather grim clerk at the counter muttered "it's seasonal; we don't have any."

I asked a native Boston tour guide about it. He said that some guy in his neighborhood makes it, but just closed up shop for the winter. I spent $40 in taxi fare going to grocery stores in search of it. Nothing. I tried several other ice cream parlors; only one person laughed. I did end up getting some tasty butter pecan ice cream at a shop in Harvard Square, but it just wasn't what I was after.

I realize this is (mostly) off-topic, but has anyone here ever eaten tutti frutti ice cream? If so, what's it like? And, is usually easier to find in Massachusetts, or is my research full of holes and folklore?
Hi there, thanks for the feedback. Luckily it's happening, check out http://www.getsatisfaction.com/balsamiq
inferior to "real" marriages, which produce biological children

I don't understand. Do we need more people? Is there a population shortage? Six billion isn't enough for what exactly?
I upmodded you, though I completely disagree with what you just said.

For starters, monogamy in highly socially stratified societies is a very rare social phenomenon. You might want to check out "The Moral Animal" for some discussion of this. The line I remember: "socially stratified monogamous cultures are the true freaks of nature" (paraphrasing here, but I'm close).

However, they do tend to be the norm among highly prosperous and free societies, which takes us to your second point...

Haven't you noticed the strong correlation between wealth and freedom and gay rights? Look who is for gay marriage and who is against it. Genentech, Google, and Apple were were very high profile donors against Prop 8. This isn't just a San Francisco leftist coalition - we're talking the biggest, heaviest hitters in the most innovative fields in America.

I agree with you that Scandanavian countries are lauded a bit too much by the left... but let's compare these economies (where gay rights are supported strongly) with the cultural and economic environment in regions where they are not... oh, say, Afghanistan?

Even in the US, the regions that support gay marriage tend to be attracting the best companies with their top notch workforce. They companies come to them, not the other way around. The regions that don't are still wondering what low skilled factory they're going to be able to attract to replace the textile mill that closed in the seventies.

Seems to me like this one is pretty obvious.
Engineering: Suddenly Sexy for College Grads - BusinessWeek
I read your argument as: insular religious extremists do bad things! Therefore, we should also deny thinking and responsible adults freedom to live as they please.

If anything, the lesson is that making something illegal pushes it underground, which makes it harder to protect those that may suffer from it in addition to punishing those that would gain from it. This is a lesson demonstrated over and over again -- there are even comments about it in the Tao Te Ching.
There's a sort of Gresham's Law of trolls: trolls are willing to use a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtful people aren't willing to use a forum with a lot of trolls in it. Which means that once trolling takes hold, it tends to become the dominant culture. http://paulgraham.com/trolls.html

I think this is also true of "diluting" comments. Once they become acceptable, the forum has had it. Everyone will say "it's already diluted, so what's the harm?"
Define sucking.

Sun is the only midlevel server company that innovates beyond buying mother boards and CPUs and assembling them. They make their own CPUs, their own OS, ZFS, serious storage solutions, etc. They foot the bill for MySQL and Java.And so on and so on.

Unfortunately, bad management can sink a good technology company.
What are you implying? That a biologist would be a chemist if s/he were smarter? That a chemist would be a physicist, and a physicist a mathematician?

Doesn't sound like a particularly useful (or accurate) way of looking at the world.
Gah. I had initially replied to the parent post with the Great Zero Challenge link, submitted and saw that you beat me. :)

AFAIK, the technique for magnetic disk recovery after one dd pass is to remove the heads and attempt to retrieve the data using laboratory equipment (more sensitive than the original heads and _vastly_ more time consuming than the commercial data recovery procedures).

You can't do that with SSDs, maybe you could attack the flash controller and exploit something like a timing attack, or maybe you could try your luck against the load leveling algorithms and dump the data from the flash chips themselves, although this would involve at least desoldering the flash chips in a big device or doing something nastier in an integrated package like a CF card. If you lose there, the next stop would seem to be something involving an electron microscope and trying to identify cells that used to be a zero and are a one now, and vice-versa -- judging from: http://hackaday.com/2008/01/01/24c3-mifare-crypto1-rfid-comp... it seems like state of the art currently is individual gate analysis, I think this would have to go farther.

From a commercial perspective, it seems like there still is some drive to build better tools: http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/10/28/flash...

tl;dr: I agree, unless you are doing something criminal, I would use a single dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/diskdevice and get on with life.
Next time we're in SF we need to get Garry to take a bunch of "stock" photos of us then just give them to these publications. He's taken one random picture of me and it was good enough to replace my profile picture on every site that has one.
Good grief man, I was originally going to post that although this is wonderful, your recent downward trend is rather concerning until I realized you had included November numbers! :-)

It might be a good move to be sure your graphs all report the same information for easy reading, especially when observing trends... either drop the current month, or few a per capita month trend.

Regardless, you certainly are an inspiration, and I wish you continued success! As someone that just needs to design with photoshop and can't work in pen and paper, I'm considering purchasing balsamiq in the future. (It's a little steep for me now) Keep up the good work!
They certainly could be a lot more efficient about it than they are now.
Your sarcasm implies that mongrel's scheduling and IPC was inferior to the OS, which is not the case.
Sun's current cost structure doesn't begin to be supported by revenue. It has ~32,000 employees, and makes $12 billion in hardware revenue, with declining gross margins (Dell, Rackspace etc. are commoditizing servers). Their "strategy" for growth is open source, but after 10 years, they still haven't shown how they will make money out of Java. MySQL is a $100 million a year business, respectable, but there is no way to see how it grows to billions without pissing off and driving away the very users that made MySQL successful.

If I were them, I would cut deep, real deep, like 50% lay-off, assume further drastic erosion in their margins (and plan to be profitable with such drastic erosion), and crucially, with a slim-but-sharply-focused R&D division, focus on coming up with innovations that people are willing to pay for.

Apple did it, Sun could. It has the heart of a great company faintly ticking somewhere deep inside, but alas, current leadership hasn't shown it is up to the job.
Jackets Schmackets
For the East Coasters, how to pick out a proper jacket for this coming winter. Style advice from His Catalog's Alisa. See more at http://hiscatalog.com
That makes a lot of sense. It's like a natural continuation of the separation between church and state.
The problem is they generally like doing their own and they have to give their photographers work. We'll still do it anyway.

Remember earlier when we talked about why all these layoffs didn't happen earlier if the people getting laid off truly weren't needed?

Yeah well...
Dupe (from a different source): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=364245
We're getting a bit into the meaning of life here now surely ;)

I'd say we need more smart people.

It would be scary if the smart people stop having kids. The world would be taken over by stupidity.
Voice Broadcasting with iBuzzPro | ProVoice Broadcasting - iBuzzPro™
> with a slim-but-sharply-focused R&D division, focus on coming up with innovations that people are willing to pay for.

Let me know when you find a repeatable way of doing it.

Apple did it, everyone is trying, Sun might.
Here are some some other links on Pig I posted here a while ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108223
So you think only gays should have the right of polygamous marriage?
I won't disagree with that, but I do think it's overrated, to be honest.
Good points sahaj. I stopped watching the business shows a long time ago because all the guests are just trying to sell the kinds of investments they profit from.

What we're going through is a "liquidity crisis" more than a "recession" and that's why gold isn't doing much and commodities are going down. There simply isn't any money anywhere.
It can't be that prestigious if they let me in.
Good idea... maybe all the gays will move to NE.
http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites-what-they-are-why-theyre-c...
Taking more irrelevant classes is probably harder (as I said), but because it's harder it is also more impressive and thus looks better on your resume (as rms said).
Obama to Broadcast Weekly Address on YouTube
Thanks.

Things are/were pretty close though. If we would have moved to SF, bye bye profitability. That's one of the main reasons we're in Boston.
There are of course non-isolated societies in the world that allow polygamy. You wouldn't want to live in any of them.
Now with concert ticket goodness. Hopefully theater tickets, more providers and roughly $2 billion worth of total tickets in early 2009.
Open-source your product
Git_remote_branch 0.3 released -- now works on multiple platforms
Yahoo had already gone bad before bringing in Semel. I think it started during the dot com craze. They had no focus or direction. They were basically becoming like AOL. In fact, that's most likely the primary reason they picked up Semel in the first place. The decision had already been made to be everything for everyone and he was supposed to be the leader to help get them there. Do you remember when they were also an ISP and had a lame magazine? When the crash came they were ditching services and divisions left and right and have really never focused on anything since.
They're NOT messing with a word that's been defined for clearly a long time. I don't think they'd define the pleas for equality before the law to be considered "messing" or "trouble making".

You DO realize that the definition of marriage has changed several times, right? Women are no longer property owned by their fathers until transferred into the possession of another Man. Being of different race no longer means you can't get married, either.

Furthermore, we re-define words all the time in the computer field. Think about how the definition of "fast" gets redefined every 18 months to to years. And how what was "fast" is now "slow".

Hands down you cannot string a rational argument against gay marriage because there isn't one. Its based on cultural fears, and intolerance. You're on the losing side of history, next to the Mississippi state police that physically assaulted my father and his friends for helping black people register to vote in early 60s. Next to KKK. And the confederates, and so on. Have fun explaining to your children or your children's children, who will grow up with gay marriage, how you were the bigot.
Cool answer to a question I just got last week "How come you never have a booth?" Walking the floor to sell is easy and if you need to present then infoChachkie's advice of booking a private room at a lesser cost for an "exclusive" presentation is much smarter.
It's interesting that he made the argument about smart people developing exotic financial instruments not having much societal benefit. The same argument could probably be made of most (but not all) tech startups. The next facebook widget, or cool web-app is hardly going solve our environmental & health problems.
Its not smart to know that. Its confident they will be bailed out.
I used to work at Sun. The major problem is that they don't understand how to make money from open source. Their business model has always been high price contracts with big companies. Unfortunately, that model no longer works for them and despite great wordage and brilliant engineers, they haven't been able to reinvent themselves.
Isn't it strange that the same community (namely, hackers) who claim to hate the Windows monoculture (and embrace alternative desktop platforms like Apple's) seems intrinsically resistant to a server-side stack that isn't based on the cheapest Intel or AMD chips they can find, running the most bog-standard version of Red Hat or Debian.

I think it's an unfortunate sign of the times that the commoditization of hardware is threatening to drive one of the last truly innovative hardware vendors out of the server market.

Of course, it may all just be karma for the time when Sun workstations more or less killed the arguably much-cooler Lisp Machines way back in the 80s.
I'm not seeing where the excuse is in that quote. Seems like a rather honest assessment of the situation without blame on external factors.
I'd like you to a cite a source about where I would and would not want to live.
Ukrainian in Kiev
Image Optimization, Part 3: Four Steps to File Size Reduction
Hmm... It's probably prudent to reach $2 million before talking about $2 billion.

Wait, are you saying you'll actually sell $2 billion worth of tickets, or just offer them for sale?
I have never said this before, but.. w00t!
100%. Work without the moments of victory is what I like to call torture.
Nick Denton's Evil Genius: No One Likes To Laugh in Tough Times
Fair enough, I had not seen Nate Silver's analysis yet before you alerted me to it.

But even if the black vote was not pivotal in this case, Silver's analysis still validates the chief point I was trying to make, which is that support for gay rights amongst African-Americans is frighteningly low and that the gay community's advocates are not doing enough to understand and get the support of the only community in the United States that truly understands what it means to be denied rights that others enjoy.

It doesn't have to be this way.
I was in Egypt recently, there is huge enthusiasm for English and Italian there.
Using NFS doesn't seem like a good idea for this situation - from the operations perspective, NFS in production is going to be hell anyway.

A better way would be (since Tokyo Cabinet is thread safe) having a separate thread/process which receives messages (using a message queuing system) that update the database files (ala MySQL replications).

(Or you can separate out the db layer as a separate network service and partition the writes/reads to go to a specific several servers based on the key. Tokyo Cabinet even includes a memcached API compatible network layer for this - the Tokyo Tyrant).
Well, but if nobody else sees value in producing their own CPUs for mid-level servers, maybe there's a reason?

If everybody else is using a free OS for mid-level servers, maybe there's a reason?

Java, OpenOffice and MySQL are neat. Know anybody who's paid money for them?

Sun's decisions in the technology world have been so bad in the last decade that you could have become rich just by watching what they do and investing in the opposite.
Mobile Monday Event This Monday - Philadelphia
Am I the only one who thinks that DHH has become a bit more civil since Merb has started to get some momentum?

It's easy to have a "f__k you if you don't like my choices" attitude when you're the only real game in town. Suddenly a player comes out of nowhere saying "hey, you can make your own choices!" and everything changes.

These myth posts -- which I really appreciate -- seem to me to be a reaction to Merb hitting version 1.0 and people starting to take it as a serious, light weight alternative to Rails. And one day Merb will become heavy and bloated with a million features and we'll see the rise of another framework. Wash. Rise. Repeat.
I wish countries were taken seriously by big G-8 nations based on, say, how much space exploration they did rather than how many nuclear weapons they have (the nuclear club).
I think the important criteria it takes to build a successful startup:

1. Make something people
2. Lots of hard work

sometimes gets lost within the criteria investors (e.g. YC) look for before funding a startup.
Google Speech to Search
Larger Than Life - Making Really Big Stickers Really Cool
screenshot or it didn't happen
I used Erlang to build a mid-sized web service app (i.e. REST only, no user interface) which serves more than two million connections per day (sustained), and is deployed on a half dozen nodes across the Internet -- different ISPs (yeah, I'm a masochist). The app integrates the Mnesia database (with replication) and the Yaws web server (with my own extensions).

On any given node there were between 1,000 and 3,000 processes (threads) handling requests and internal jobs. I had supervisor trees for ensuring that everything kept running. All that worked like a charm.

Most of the issues I ran into were with getting the host infrastructure (Linux in my case) configured correctly. Things like number of available socket handles etc. Erlang dies unceremoniously when it runs out of system resources.

Mnesia is really nice. My database isn't very big (~500K objects), but still needed to be redundant and highly available. Setting all that was a breeze compared to most SQL dbs.

Yaws is nice, in that it's a full featured web server, but I'd probably also look at Mochiweb (http://bob.pythonmac.org/archives/2007/11/07/mochiweb-anothe...).

Given that you have a requirement for "massive parallelism" -- high concurrency, Erlang is a very good option. I also believe Scala (http://debasishg.blogspot.com/2006/11/threadless-concurrency...) and Clojure (http://clojure.org/concurrent_programming) offer reasonable alternate approaches.

Good luck.
And I wish life were a neverending frolic on a mountainside covered with bacon-flavoured daisies. But what's your point?