skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article briefly hints at the less regulated internet transit industry. I worked for two years at a company that sold competitive intelligence tools to large ISPs, and what I learned about the global telecom business was pretty eye-opening.

First, internet transit is incredibly competitive. The protocols are designed from the ground up to support changes and redundancy in network routes, so there is not a lot preventing any company from switching ISP service aside from their contracts and the constraints of what wires reach their data center. Because of this competition, prices are always getting lower and vendors are constantly working to reduce costs. Geography is a very significant variable, of course: getting a lot of bandwidth in rural Idaho is going to be much much more expensive than getting it in New York, London, or Seoul because you won't have many options. The most expensive, of course, is in markets that are regulated monopolies; many African countries have absolutely ludicrous bandwidth costs for the same reason they are expensive to fly to.

On the bright side, though, ISPs are constantly working to make the network more efficient. One mechanism for this is peering, where two ISPs agree to exchange traffic that is bound for destinations on each other's network directly, rather than each individually paying their provider to do so. It used to be that only large ISPs would bother to work our peering agreements among each other, but over the past 10 years peer-to-peer traffic has dramatically increased traffic between different ISPs in local and regional markets, so those smaller guys have learned to do peering as well.

What does all this mean? I'm no libertarian, but it's hard not to be awed by the efficiency and power of the unregulated global internet. For whatever reason, tens of thousands of companies are working together around the world in an amazingly cooperative and efficient way, even though many of them are fierce competitors. We could certainly stand some of that in the domestic telephone market, and we'll probably get it eventually, if only because the cost of VOIP transit will probably round to zero within our lifetime.
"dewey defeats truman!"
RightScale Teams With Eucalyptus for Cloud Solutions
I think an example of the failures of rote learning is a simple math problem.

An army is marching down a road at Xmph and stretches out 1 mile in length. An officer at the rear of the army notices a problem. How long does it take him to get to the front of the line traveling at Ymph and how many minutes does it take him to do the round trip?

Now, if you hand this to a bunch of collage students who have not seen it before a surprisingly small fraction is going to be able to do it quickly and they are not generally the ones who think of math a series of steps from problem to solution.
Google Chrome and Variations: Still Maturing
I've emailed everybody that sent me an email about this, if you haven't gotten one please email me again.
you read 6 ppm reading fiction! Holy shit! I don't think I read even half that.

You should get your books at the library. Its much cheaper and then you give it back and somebody else gets to read it. Far fewer dead trees and moving is infinitely easier.
Oh geez, here we go again. Let's get one thing straight, Huffington. Alan Greenspan's model has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with free markets.
"...as I get older I'm much more willing to "bail out" of a book."

I used to feel honor-bound to finish any book I started, but now I'm smarter than that. Life is too short to keep slogging through something that doesn't interest me.
Tournaments, bots, & book sales (perhaps via Amazon affiliation) seem to be the best roads to driving traffic & monetization. Perhaps you could check out legalities of small entry fee tournaments with book prizes? (Perhaps give large discounts on entries for monthly subscribers?) Also - bot friendly tournaments with entry fee for bots, with monthly subscriptions available. Leaderboards!
Most of the ways that people rationalize their voting behavior can also be modified to rationalize the purchase of lottery tickets.
Was the leader too restrictive, or did he not maintain important boundaries and directives?
Worlds: Tabs for Programming by Alan Kay
In France, it works the same way as in Sweden evidently.

I believe one of the aspects that makes it different in the US is that on election day, there isn't only one thing to vote for. There's the President, a Senator, a Congressman, a Judge, local public transports directors, etc. and a bunch of propositions.
And that's different from one county to the next, from one state to the other.

I suppose that's part of what made it interesting to look into computerized voting machines.
The position in .wa.us that has authority over this role is "Secretary of State". I assume that it's the same in other states. Here in WA, one SoS's core platform is basically this. http://www.jasonosgood.com/platform.html .

I'm not attempting to influence your vote nor encouraging discussion on this specific candidate's merits -- just wanted to throw out there that in many cases today is also your day to vote your position on issues of this type as well.
It would help to vote on fewer things. Here in SF, my ballot included:

President/VP: vote for 1 of 6 listed choices
US Rep: 1 of 4
State Senator: 1 of 2
State Assembly: 1 of 2
County Superior Court Judge: 1 of 2
City Board of Education: 4 of 15
Local Community College Board: 4 of 9
BART (commuter trains) Director: 1 of 2
12 yes/no State Propositions
22 yes/no City Propositions
City Supervisor (Councilman): preference rank 3 of 3

That's insane; there's no chance of the average busy person making reasonable informed choices on all of these, and we should be able to delegate most of this to elected representatives.

(If my math is correct, and not even counting the option to abstain/undervote, that's asking me to express almost 63 bits of preferences -- and more bits are allocated to the less-important issues.)

I would propose a 'complexity budget' on any election's ballot, limiting it to one page or no more than some small number N of decisions.

What to do with all the overflow items? Kick them to an 'electoral jury'. a few hundred people randomly selected from all voters, who would know weeks in advance of their status, and get to meet and discuss all issues in detail. (Perhaps, as another way to improve the attentiveness/quality of this pool, compensate service or let those selected without the time/interest to participate nominate their own proxy on the jury.)

Then, instead of a system that almost seems designed to confuse and discourage attentive voters, you'd have broad voting on the few major issues, and statistically representative but highly focused voting on the minutiae.
Yes. Good books are full of ideas. And that is never a waste of time.
Do selected startups also help in the next round's selection process?
I have the Aeron but I actually prefer the slightly cheaper Mirra (just has a better feel). Basic Mirra is $599 and fully loaded is $799.
This trend has been going on for some time:

http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/12/nytimes_tracks...

What I think is really interesting about WoW is that unlike practically every other MMORPG, the number of subscribers continues to rise after four years on the market. The usual pattern is to peak after a year or two, and then gradually fade:

http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html

I wonder about the role of expansion packs in this phenomenon, and whether other types of gaming or software products could follow a similar model, instead of complete product replacements to new versions.
Seriously, I'm becoming more persuaded that voting for the right person is much more important than some pragmatic, battle winning perspective that says minimize evil and maximize win potential. One election is not that much in the grand scheme of things. The funny thing is that once everyone realizes this, the principled vote becomes the pragmatic vote.

Disclaimer, I didn't do that this time, so don't take this as reverse psychology. If you think it is, go ahead and vote pragmatically. If that confused you even more, then don't vote. Now stop thinking about it before your head explodes.
Three factors that changed online poll tracking
Google Visualization API Goes Server-Side
Salesforce.com’s Clouded Dreams
I think McCain supporters will go batshit crazy if he loses: they'll be convinced that fraud was involved, rather than people getting sick and tired of Republican incompetence.
Oh, what I'm doing is something you're not even thinking of ;) I don't want to describe the project till I have a prototype up, but when I do, I'll make a youtube video. All I'll do is drop hints about how explosive this will be :)
and everything to do with the 'wizards of money'!
If people are willing to pay for a higher level avatar, etc, I wonder why Blizzard doesn't just allow one to purchase that directly from them. Virtual worlds are one place where actually putting time in to do "work" is only required if the owners of the world decide to require it.
Not to put too fine a point on it, say I'm the only bee in your bonnet!
You just saved me 30 minutes of googling for these answers. Thanks a bunch.
Wrangler: refactoring for Erlang in Emacs and Eclipse
http://scantegrity.org/

Scantegrity is an open source election verification technology for optical scan voting systems. It uses privacy preserving confirmation numbers to allow each voter to verify her vote is counted. The confirmation numbers also allow anyone to verify that all the votes were counted correcly.
Not all states provide early voting. The vast majority of votes will be cast today.
I did private tourneys with friends at pokerstars before the 2006 law.
The higher the price, the harder it is to find it. No wonder I couldn't find the price on their website.
Here's my suggestions:

1. Everyone votes online. (Computers could be set up in voting centers for folks without computer.) Codes are sent via snail mail. That one-time code allows a person to log in and vote. (An issue would be protecting the voter from anyone knowing his choices.)

2. Because everyone votes online, the focus will be the fleet of back-end servers processing the requests. The hardware and software will be open sourced. On hand at the data center will be neutral parties monitoring the software and equipment and could include representatives from both parties and some independent verification teams.

3. As data enters the system, it will be available for everyone to observe. APIs will be available for programmers to create real-time information on the election. It might be used to detect fraud.
A piece of paper with boxes printed beside the names of those running for office -- we’ll call this paper a ‘ballot’.

The voter receives a ballot from those managing their place of voting (after showing identification or a registration card of some sort), has their name physically crossed off a printed list and then, after moving behind a screen or other mechanism to allow for privacy, places an 'x' in the box beside the name of the individual they are voting for. The voter then folds the ballot and places it anonymously into a box used to collect the votes for their district. A ‘ballot box’, if you will.

Once the polls close, volunteers for the place of voting manually count the paper ballots for the individuals running for office and report the count to a central election office. This manual count rarely takes more than an hour or so to complete.

Simple enough? Votes remain anonymous, the paper ballots create a permanent audit trail and, as long as the ballot boxes are supervised by reliable third-parties minimally affiliated with those running for office, the voter will be assured their vote is counted towards their intended result.

This is how most of the developed world handles elections. It saves us a ton of trouble in close races.

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil -- Donald Knuth"

There are some things which should not be optimized. An extremely important, easily manipulated event prone to corruption which occurs once every few years (and only takes two hours to complete manually) might be considered one of them.
"Strong Bad" returns a quite accurate palette. Nice. :)
Or Skype. $3/month for unlimited domestic calls, 2c/minute to most countries. I believe I'm also paying $30/year per SkypeIn number (1 in San Francisco, 1 in Brisbane). It works on my iPhone, although basically I can have access to my home phone line so long as I have a net connection and some computing potential. I also have a dedicated wireless Skype home phone for convenience.

Shame about the woeful customer service.
I love to read. Unfortunately I don't have a lot of time to read right now. I'm working my way through the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy series for my first time. I'm listening to the Now Habit right now. Probably my favorite non-fiction book is Godel Eshcer Bach. Catch-22 is my favorite fiction book.
Video Site Brightcove Shuts Down Free Services
Who Cares About Open Source In The Cloud
What would Facebook look like if it sold out to ads? Click here to see…
I'm not sure I believe this works:

http://www.gpeters.com/color/color-schemes.php?search_term=b...
It seems to be displayed only if you're logged in. For the curious:
"The Basic services will cost between $120 and $149 a month (the introductory price for this week is $99 for three months), while the Pro package starts at $349."
I'm unaware of the legality, but there might be an opportunity to combine a web of trust with online poker. Track play money bankrolls but provide some feedback mechanisms players could use to settle outside the site. Pay for the site via ads. Being purely ad supported would be a nice feather for your software licensing business demonstrating hosting cost advantages.
Interesting. It's program flow like with continuations and state management like with SQL transactions.
A Proclamation
You can't tell people anything
Nice idea, but it seems to be broken (at least for me.)
What I Believe
French pirates face net cut-off
Video at the polling booths might be illegal with our current laws.
Glam Media Blames Economy, Slows Down Payments To Publishers
Tried it. Don't like it. No options to turn it on or off. The fonts are frakked making it hard to read.
If it has to be a touchscreen, then start with http://pvote.org/. It's orders of magnitude simpler than the commercial voting machines.
I like it. A little slow but it seemed to work for me:

http://www.gpeters.com/color/color-schemes.php?search_term=f...

http://www.gpeters.com/color/color-schemes.php?search_term=b...
Rainforest Fungus Naturally Synthesizes Diesel
I have been working with 2 others on a product that will be released to a larger beta within a month called Wizehive. It lets you organize and share among others notes, tasks, upload and share files, integrates with email, has an iphone app, a twitter-like feed that pulls it all together, etc.
If you'd like an invite to the private beta we'd love to get more feedback.
Email me at wizehive@gmail.com
You're right, being good at arithmetic isn't a substitute for training in axiomatic mathematics (for someone who is interested in math). Programs like this are about making sure everyone can make change without a calculator & and do back-of-the-envelope estimations, rather than training Putnam winners or even breeding more math majors.
Love to read - I used to read a lot more fiction, but as of late, have been reading a lot of non-fic to include magazines like Scientific American, The Economist and Harvard Business Review. My current reading list includes the following books, currently on my desk at the office:

Good in room by Stephanie Palmer
About giving good presentations and pitches

The design of future things by Donald Norman
Many of you have probably read or heard about his previous book, 'design of everyday things'

A class with Drucker by William Cohen
Lessons learned by a former student of the renowned business/management professor Peter Drucker
I'm not sure this makes much sense. Can you choose to eat non-FDA approved foods or drugs; no, you go to jail if you do. Airlines can train their own pilots, if someone was in the air force before becoming a commercial pilot, that's great but not relevant. People outside of the US use Internet protocols paid for by DARPA, but they don't pay taxes.

Anyway, it is very easy to avoid income tax in the US -- don't have any income. Last time I checked, you don't forfeit any services, either.
just waited just under 2 hours to vote here in GA, we'll see how this goes...
Yawn.

Who cares what entp uses as a testing framework?
Yes I've found reading a story and learning through vicarious living to be effective.

That's why my two favorite startup books are High Stakes No Prisoners and Founders at Work.
My guess is that they evaluated how much money they would gain from doing this versus how much they would lose in subscriptions where people didn't feel like they could adequately compete against wealthier players.

Additionally, Blizzard makes their money from the longevity of their players. Someone who paid someone else to power level their characters are going to have a smaller emotional tie to their character, and are going to be less likely to continue to subscribe in the long-term (as a large amount of content has already been skipped for them).
To coda that part in a side effect way is a critical part of this approach. It's easy to implement in Haskell where these are handled with trust or you need to do the hard work.
I have no idea how appropriate or inappropriate to Hacker News this is, but it is awesome so I'm upvoting it. I especially like that it is from May 2005.
We have three elections at the same time (national, regional, communal), and the solution is simple: make the slips for each election have different colors. The national election slips are white, communal slips are blue etc.

To make sure nobody takes puts e.g. national slips in all three envelopes there's a small cutout at the edge of the envelope that shows the color of the slip inside without revealing the vote.
I've used it on a small Ramaze project. Quite nice.
Pervs: Finally, a Porn Webcams Site Just for the iPhone
"So, did you vote for Obama?"

"No, I wrote in for the Ron Paul/Hypnotoad ticket."

"WHAT!? But you don't want McCain to win, do you?"

"No, but I live in California. Unless I vote a couple million times, my vote doesn't matter. California's blue by about 20 points."

"I can't believe you!!"

Some people just don't get statistics.
Is there any indication that a new party will take the GOP's place in the two-party system?
Agreed -- but this is a different venue than a podcast they are both on.
I believe I've seen enough slam poetry already.
I wish I could read like I used to, but I have a full time job and I'm building a prototype for a startup simultaneously. I usually get through every month or two reading in the same spare moments a lot of people take for reading (:
About a year ago we had Josh Benaloh of Microsoft Research as a guest lecturer in a UW course on computing security. He talked about the cryptographic side of voting systems, some of the papers on his page are a good place to begin: http://research.microsoft.com/users/benaloh/

Edit: there are systems that can provably work, tally votes in encrypted form, and provide a reasonable audit trail all while maintaining privacy. Unfortunately the contracts for voting machines don't seem to be awarded based on technical merit -- which, ironically, is entirely a function of who we voted for in the past.
What's so bad about Kings? Most modern Monarchies seem to do just fine.
Apple's Secret Weapon - Forbes.com
Too bad all that education gets reduced to essentially one bit..
Black Swan is definitely worth reading. It is somewhat repetitive and you may find it dull if you don't have a taste for philosophy, but I think it's an extremely important book -- its an overview of the cutting edge of human thinking and illustrates the mistakes of past thinkers that continue to trouble us.
DIY PIC Micro House Network [PicNET2]
That's one thing that's always struck me about certain other countries' legislative bodies. South Korea, for instance, has a long tradition of fistfights on the legislative floor (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4wn70xPxzc). They also have one of the best telecommunications infrastructures in the world; perhaps we should encourage pugilistic resolutions to Congressional filibusters in the USA.
"Voting in the democratic system implicitly means you support democracy. "

Right, but it may also mean you support that particular form of voting. The USA, for example, does not go by majority rule in Presidential elections, and overall the system seems skewed to a 2-party, and 2-party only, system. So, one may want to support democracy but be repelled by the voting options.

(I'd really like to see a more robust means of electing officials, but I'm reluctant to not use the current shoddy system to try to effect what change I can. So I end up having to implicitly support what exists now. )

"If you do not support democracy, therefore, it would be quite rightly against your principles to vote."

It's interesting that many people who are gung-ho on voting are less so about voting on voting itself, that is, on being able to choose to abstain entirely.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden: The Change We Need | www.EasyToInsureMe.com: Barack a Hero
PicNET2 allows to develop a DIY domotic network with easy-to-use and cheap devices. I wanted to make possible the communication between the little devices (the well-known PIC) in a simple, safe and cheap way so the idea was born.
Here's the thing: Sweden has < 10 million people. And not all of those people can vote (children for example). On the other hand, the United States has a population of > 300 Million people. And ~180 million people are eligible to vote if they chose to do so. Then again, we consider a 50% voter turnout good. That's 90 Million ballots to count up. In the same amount of time as it takes you folks to count up 6-7 million ballots. Clearly (to me at least), due to the sheer number of people, different systems are needed here.

Or you could look at land size. Sweden's size: 449,964 km2 or 173,732sq mi. United States size: 9,826,630 km² or 3,794,066 sq mi. Have to transmit the data somehow - its not like you can drive the ballots across the US to one central point in under a few hours. So why not do it one at a time as they're cast electronically? Assuming it's done properly at least.
I came across this blog about the Wild West of Internet peering/transit when they had the undersea cable episodes. You might find it interesting.

http://www.renesys.com/blog/
Firefox Reaches 20% Market Share for First Time Ever
Thoughts on the Cloud
If Blizzard were to really make this legitimate, new users would probably be turned off to the fact that they, too, are sweating to boost their character when others are just buying it. If it is somewhat underground, many people don't see it as legitimate and won't be turned off or notice that others around them simply buy their status.
Flickr Without Yahoo?
Windows Users Patch Adobe Now | TechJaws
Starbucks via Twitter - Due to Election Laws, Free Coffee Whether you Vote Or Not
Hmm, sounds interesting, although I'm wondering if there's a significant difference to what immutable data structures together with STM provide - it certainly sounds very much like the transactions you can perform in Clojure, where, if certain conditions aren't met, all modifications are rolled back and you can bail out of your changes. If I had a degree in CS I'd probably even know the name for the difference between the techniques. :-/