skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you're losing the message he's trying to push - the wealthiest splinter of southeast Asia has created a beacon for talent to gather, for the rural poor to have something to aspire to (and many do, go to China and you will hear many of these success stories). Yes, the poorest of Chinese are still far poorer than the poorest of Americans, but what we're talking about is the ability for a country to forge ahead, something we haven't done for a while now. Take my (former) home country, Taiwan, for example - it has a massive, efficient, fast, and reliable public transport infrastructure that is both affordable and safe. This is country-wide. How many American cities can say the same? We are losing the war on infrastructure, which in the end means losing every other war that matters.

And to answer your question: yes we are. I will be graduating in a few months from a fairly good engineering school, and many of my fellow engineering majors are panicking - they all went down the financial engineering route instead of traditional electrical, mechanical, and civil engineering, and now they're all jobless. Before the big collapse of '08 there was definitely a large sense floating about campus that people who did "real" engineering were suckers. This is not an uncommon phenomenon.

Same thing back in high school - everyone guns for the big money. Tons of smart high school students went into business school instead of science or engineering, simply because one pays the bills, and the other not so much. My evidence is anecdotal, but this is based on observation from entire graduating classes.
only votes on the story itself matter.
The front page of Digg is worth traffic, and therefore money. If you control access to the front page, that too is worth money.
Then compare it with Beijing, Tokyo, and Shanghai. Hong Kong is not the only "crown jewel" city in Asia. And FYI, Beijing and HK are plenty diverse.

I find your point here to be disingenuous. Because NYC has more people it is not comparable to other large cities in Asia? Because NYC serves citizens through democratic multi-tiered governments that this does not exist in Asia as well? Look at major metropolises like Taipei, Tokyo, Seoul, and the awesome number of huge cities in India. All are served by democratically elected governments. If one were to take your post as gospel you'd think the entirety of Asia was one gigantic totalitarian wasteland!

I think Friedman is onto something - as a Chinese-Canadian I've seen both sides of the fence, and it absolutely terrifies me that we are facing the very real possibility of an oppressive dictatorship becoming the new world superpower, and all because we were too busy screwing selling ourselves out.
As opposed to the tens of millions of Americans living in poverty? Yeah, the Chinese poor have it far worse than the poor in America - but at least their middle class is growing, not shrinking. Wealth is being generated for the everyman, and things are rapidly getting better for the average Joe.

Compared to the shrinking middle class in America as wealth flows upwards.

Don't get me wrong - I'm far from pro-Chinese, I'm just saying, let's not let the fact that there are starving people there prevent us from seeing our own faults.
I think it would be more clever to use an actual valid TCP connection and hide the data in the fragment sizes, timing, push flags, and other various legal flags and options available. This doesn't let you mask your source, but it allows two way communication.
The first list is the list of the Nobel Laureates they OWN
not they EDUCATED! Richer is the University more N.L it can
hire and pay. :)

The Wiki is the one.
I understand your sentiment, but let's not make Digg/Reddit a fearmongering catchphrase, like the word "communist" in the 1950's, or the word "terrorist" of today.
Please get over yourself. Lots of people have lots of reasons for owning whatever computer they choose. Thanks for the comical generalization though.
So why is this the fault of mark-to-market? The banks knew the rules of the game, and they knew the terms of the contracts. They were speculating on asset appreciation, they got burned, and now they are bankrupt.
Dmitry Orlov makes the parallel between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the impending collapse of US. However, I get a feeling he's much more versed in the Russian culture than the American one; as such, I doubt the collapse (if it happens and doesn't turn into a strong but passing depression) will happen as he predicts. Then again, who of us knows the future?
This is worth watching if you have an hour to kill. Not only is the first 30 minutes relevant to HN, but the second 30 minutes about foundation stuff is pretty inspirational. In 20-30 years there will be countless people living full lives who would be dead if it weren't for BG. Pretty amazing guy.
So, RAID-Z is awesome, but probably not so useful in this case.

RAID-Z, among other things, is designed to offer parity (in a better implementation than traditional RAID parity). But you probably don't care about that with EBS. EBS volumes have an annual failure rate of 0.1%-0.5%. Commodity disks have an annual failure rate of 4%. That means that EBS is already taking care of parity in some way and you probably should worry about things other than that - like speed.

So, you could use RAID-Z to increase reliability (and it's a wonderful technology), but the speed of RAID-0 would be really nice for a good database server given that parity is taken care of.
I'm one anecdotal example of why Macs are sometimes worth the extra cash.

After being fed up with my old Toshiba laptop being crap, and their warranty department refusing to service (apparently bad fan bearings were "wear and tear" items), I splashed out for a top of the line MacBook Pro 2 years ago, and started experiencing problems soon after getting it - first the lid would refuse to close (the latch button got stuck), and then my HDD died. Anyhoo, long story short I sent it in twice, and in total got about 5 major parts replaced.

Rewind to 4 months ago, my machine was really on the fritz, VRAM was shot and would display random colors (textbook memory corruption). Below is everything that happened:

- Called Apple, waited <5 minutes for an agent.

- Gave the agent my info, and she immediately remarked that given my repair history I could qualify for a full replacement, and asked if I would like to proceed.

- Waited <5 minutes for tier 2 support.

- Tier 2 listened to my problem, got me to run some diagnostics to confirm my VRAM was shot, and after a few minutes authorized a full replacement, with a brand spanking new unibody MacBook Pro. I was handed off to a replacement rep via email and the shipping label was sent to me within an hour of hanging up.

- I have some projects in the pipe that I didn't want to put on ice for too long, so I called my rep after I shipped my old laptop off to explain, he sent the new one before even confirming with UPS that my old one was on the way back to Apple.

- That was Friday, it got here Tuesday - across a national border.

On this experience alone, and contrasted with the service I've received from Toshiba and Dell, Apple has basically cemented me as a repeat customer.
Here's a page where you can report bugs for the WebKit project:

http://webkit.org/quality/reporting.html
So your first argument is that he's "merely three years older", and then your response to a rebuttal is that he's as much as "thirty-three percent older".
< the etymology points where you suggest :) but
the fact is that in France if you can align a "good" school
name in your CV you can be a moron you get the job!
Charities database and navigator:

http://www.charitynavigator.org
Choose your own by simple search:

http://www.charitynavigator.org
I think it would be better to create a site that embraces the user fragmentation. I want to create a news aggregation site that provides a different set of articles for each user.
I saw one of these being demoed in the valley recently and that was the thing that struck me. "Meh, it's just a big iPhone." Apple have stolen Microsoft's thunder by putting multi-touch in the hands of consumers way before MS did.

That isn't to say these devices aren't fun. They just don't have quite the same wow factor as they did pre-iPhone.
I think I smell "bias" against Microsoft in the headline.
Sorry to repeat what everybody else is saying, but Thomas Friedman is a total loser. Why he is famous is beyond me.

3/5 cheap rhetoric, 1/5 bragging about some "exotic" place he has been, 1/5 self evident observation equals one Thomas Friedman column.

Dear NYT. Fire this man already!

Oh, wait. NYT is the newspaper who thinks it is a good idea to employ Ben Stein too. They will not see the incompetence of Friedman if they are blind to the insanity of Ben Stein (search google for Ben Stein Watch)....
And how did you discover those commands?
Blame is not a wasted effort, if it leads you to think about what policies are to blame for where we are now and think about what needs to change. I'd say that profit is much less interesting, people find ways of enriching themselves without caring about improving society or doing anything useful. I'd wager that that mindset is at least partially to blame for the current state of affairs.
and not all of these accounts represent a single user. I'm sure there is lots of stuff like StatTweets going on where one business represents many accounts.

At the same time, I suspect that it is services like StatTweets which will make Twitter go mainstream and present a business model for them.
Link to Submarine please? It's too common a word to search.
I have used Emacs on almost every day of my life for about 10 years. I love Emacs and use those functions (as well as describe-key) fairly frequently. What's my favorite way to figure out how to do some random arcane thing in emacs?

Google.

It's often pleasantly surprised that some task I thought was esoteric is actually solved in the standard emacs libs, but the fact that I had to go to Google to find it doesn't say great things about the editor's discoverability. IMO, Emacs is about as discoverable as a dynamic programming language with a decent interactive interpreter such as ipython or irb.

I'm not saying it's the wrong tradeoff -- but if you want to learn Emacs you probably should read a book or two and ideally spend some time with a master. You really can't just bring it up and figure out that M-q will conveniently re-wrap the current paragraph or that M-^ joins the current line to the previous line and removes intermediate whitespace.
Fry's allegedly scammed out of $65 million by exec; I'm not sympathetic
Can someone who knows about the thing tell me how it's different from OpenMP? Their little example of accelerating a loop, at least, looks much like a standard OpenMP case.
I was actually one of their alpha testers. It wasn't that fun. You'd basically go around to trees and collect different colored paper. If you got enough reams of blue paper you could trade it in for red paper. Then if you got enough red paper you could trade it in for purple paper. That's all there really was. The game might have gotten better when it went into beta, but I think I stopped playing with it long before then.
I simply find it sad. Not because all these apps were made -- there's obviously money in it, so whatever, free market and so forth. What's sad is... there's money in it.
Emacswiki (http://emacswiki.org) is also quite helpful, FWIW, and it always helps to have someone around who will patiently answer questions.
More regulation may be needed, but I'd be satisfied with enforcement of existing regulation -- which was completely and utterly neglected during the Bush administration, but that began during the Clinton administration.

The financial crisis was caused by more than lack of, and lack of enforcement of, existing regulation, but that was certainly a large part of it.

The root of the crisis, though, was an orgy of greed and profligate avarice that consumed American society at all levels and we will be paying the price of that for a while.

The blame is spread out over so many parties that it doesn't really matter who we blame. It's all valid.
The human brain, lacking infinite computational capacity, invents simplifying abstractions to understand the world. These abstractions increase the realm of human thought, but they also lead to errors when the simplification smooths out details that cause important differences between two events supposed to be of the same class.
I spent about 30 minutes reading the the Emacs Tutorial when I first starting using the editor.
"More regulation may be needed, but I'd be satisfied with enforcement of existing regulation"

Certainly when one reads the Markapolos memo to the SEC about Madoff's Ponzi scheme

http://online.wsj.com/documents/Madoff_SECdocs_20081217.pdf

which I learned about here on HN, it's painfully apparent that there wasn't even minimal effort put into enforcing long-standing laws.
The problem is, to read those, you already have to know what "M-x" means. Catch-22.

Emacs is self-documenting, yes, but its help system (much like the rest of it!) seems to be designed for experienced users who can't quite remember the syntax for font-lock-keywords* , rather than new users who trying to figure out how to switch buffers or what "font-lock" even is. It's awesome once you get it, but using a help system to answer questions about basics shouldn't assume experience.

* http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/FontLockKeywords

The tutorial does help, though.
Isn't it funny how conspiracy theorists always seem to lose the bigger picture. He compares the meltdown of a command economy that a had oppressed its own people for better part of a century with a recession i the US, arguably the worlds strongest economy.
classic example of how democracy turns into an in-group oligarchy. there is no way to engineer a democracy so that certain people will not wield disproportionate power.

this is a problem, for government to be effective responsibility and power must be equal. since democracy always ultimately ties responsibility back to the masses there is no accountability.

notice how in this example, just as with political democracy, power is wielded through framing what people vote on and not controlling the votes directly. the in-group does not actively prevent any story from reaching the top. but engineer the system in such a way that it is phenomenally unlikely for out-groups to get their content noticed, regardless of merit.
'Green' Jobs Compete for Stimulus Aid
There are also plenty of people happy to be typing their essays in Microsoft Word for the Mac, rather than Microsoft Word for the PC.
26,000 diggs in two months should have meant, $13k right </quote>

It is about one digg per minute working full-time (8 hours a day) for two months straight!

26 000 / ((2 months) / ((24 hours) / (8 hours))) = 0.889820511 minutes^(-1)

google calculator: http://is.gd/dnFp
Alternate title: "How to win at World of Diggcraft"
All quite debatable. Excel, for example, is one of the single best pieces of software I've ever used. As another example, I find Itunes clunky and hard to use.

Don't get me wrong, I still hate Bill Gates the monopolist. What I don't like is the knee-jerk reaction that anything he or Microsoft does is evil, and anything that Apple/Google/etc. does is good. We can still learn from him as a businessman, and we can also admire his philanthropic contributions.
I'm new to this whole Zed Shaw thing. Is there something to this than watching a guy act like an asshole while calling other people assholes?
I am sure Zed is smart. His rants don't sound very enlightening to me, though. I am certainly not made smarter by hearing him opine on how many guys subconsciously want to be filled with his cock.

It's his blog though, I guess he can do what he wants.
I think NeXT is a more apt comparison.
Self signed certificates are pointless, unless you verify the certificate hash out of band.
I was about to point out that House isn't a real person, but then realized that I have no idea about Zed either. Ahem.
emacs tells you what "M-x" means on the introduction screen each time you start it.

The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
That's a brilliant idea! Anyone fancy actually doing this?

I find I usually need to use a new feature a few times before it sinks
in, this can be hard when it's not something I need very often. A
game like thingy where I could try out the feature a few times (maybe
completing a timed task or something) would maybe help that a lot, and
could be fun too (for the weird definition of fun that applies to
people who like learning new Emacs commands)!

I'd probably be up for participating in a project to create a set of
these games, anyone else?

I'll check back on replies to this comment after Christmas, then maybe
put up a project page.
The idea of goal column seemed so bizarre to me at first ("why the
hell would anyone want to do that?") that I had no problem remembering
what it did. Then I just kept on coming across situations where it's
really useful (mainly when defining macros, but elsewhere as well).

Rectangle commands on the other hand I've not managed to internalize
yet, I know they exist and I see they must be very useful. But
whenever I come accross something that possibly could use them I end
up using something else.
It certainly depends on what you're interested in. This is more of an encyclopedia of mathematics than a textbook. If you want an broad idea of many different fields of mathematics and the history behind them, presented in a well-written and relatively elementary style, this is the book for you. However, the problem with being relatively elementary is that most of the articles merely skim the surface of whatever subject they are describing.

If you want to actually be able to solve problems using math (the fun part, for most amateur mathematicians), a textbook would be a better bet. If you stopped math at business calculus and want a great introduction to the calculus that mathematicians use, I wholeheartedly recommend Michael Spivak's Calculus as a next step.
That wouldn't by such a great idea in my opinion, it's not such an
advanced thing in Emacs to be rebinding keys, it's almost essential
for normal use in fact.

When you're binding your own keys you need to know what that key
already does so you can decide if it's something you use now or
might use in the future. If it is then you probably don't want to
use that key.

It would be a pretty bad situation to get to a "you've unlocked new
feature X"! But then find that the key for new feature X is the same
one you're fingers know to do something else. Not that you couldn't
just rebind it to something else but that would just lead to a huge
amount of differences from the norm with no good reason (on top of the
the already huge amount of differences from the norm for a good reason
that most peoples Emacs already carry around).
The author needs needs to get some exercise... like a lot of Americans.
Microsoft did this with the Paperclip in Microsoft Word.

Progressive disclosure works well in computer games, which are relatively linear. Shortcuts in text editors are just that - shortcuts. Perhaps it might be more appropriate to ambiently detect when someone is going the long way about a task, and recommend a shorter route.

Ex sequence: End, Shift + Home, Del

Recommends: Ctrl + Shift + Del (Scintilla line delete shortcut)
I think it was Churchill that said that democracy is a terrible way to run a country, but it's the least terrible of the alternatives.
I don't think you should overlook parents. Professional parents are always looking for things to help their children. My son was very intelligent but had ADD, so it was very difficult to keep him engaged with standard materials. Administrators often tried to put him in the slower classes instead of challenging him. I would certainly have subscribed to a service that engaged him.
I can't find `describe-bindings` or `C-h b` to be mentioned in the tutorial.
Even the worst democratic governments of the world have due process, the right to actually hear what the charges are, courts, etc.
I've hung out with him in person. He is a nice guy in real life, though very opinionated and with an overdeveloped sense of justice. He believes strongly in being nice to people who are nice to him and the converse.
Would be nice to see ExtJS on the list too. Not sure why it always gets left off lists like this - its an amazing UI framework.
Software I Paid For But No Longer Use
I think the next killer apps will consist of software that is gradually opened up as the user becomes more familiar with it. You can take this approach with anything, but I love the fact that the writer referenced to video games. Heck, there is a LOT from video games we can learn like a point system. If you want a great example, look at www.thesixtyone.com (I am not behind that, but I am familiar with who created it, former guys who worked at Electronic Arts).

You can make the most complex software work for the simplest every day person if you open it up gradually. Why do I have all of the crap that currently exists in Microsoft Word if I don't even need it? Arguably, this is why there is so much hype around products such as Basecamp that are a world simpler than the current products that exist. We're trying to build 1 product to accomodate 100% of its users.
You could start with http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=emacs
Yes, but. From Alan Kay[1]:

"One of the keys to how all this worked was the PARC version of Catch-22, known as "Error-33". One committed Error-33 by putting any externally controlled system, in-house or out, on one's critical path. This included vendors. Error-33 was avoided by doing all that was necessary within a research group and then sharing. Thus, virtually all the PARC hardware — including two big time-sharing main frames, the Altos, Ethernet, Laserprinter, file storage, and the systems that followed — and software — including operating systems, programming languages and development systems, productivity tools, etc. — were completely built inhouse by these few dozen researchers.

This sounds disastrous, but there is an important collection of theories in which the 1st order version and the 2nd order version are completely different yet both are true. For example, in programming there is a wide-spread 1st order theory that one shouldn't build one's own tools, languages, and especially operating systems. This is true—an incredible amount of time and energy has gone down these ratholes. On the 2nd hand, if you can build your own tools, languages and operating systems, then you absolutely should because the leverage that can be obtained (and often the time not wasted in trying to fix other people's not quite right tools) can be incredible."

[1] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2004001_power.pdf
I think that Hoff is suggesting that creating value is better than blaming. As an entrepreneur I seek to create value, this enables me to make a profit. Adjusting my business to changed circumstances is a requirement for survival.
Here's one for US, CA, UK, AU.
http://worldproxy202.com/
Thanks for mentioning it!

It exists, it works, it's probably stable for things on the less-complex side of github (they had some SSL issues we've worked on addressing).

It's also about to get a big kickback from the Powerset/MS development on 0-point-of-failure deployments. That code is basically working at Powerset, and I can start to migrate it. I even have hours allotted on company time for it!
What we have in the U.S. is not democracy (literally, "rule by the people"). We have, instead, a quasi-accountable tyranny of politicos and lobbyists. Do not call that democracy.
Tell HN: Merry Christmas
Best wishes to all of you. May the new year bring everything you hope for.

http://www.questionablecontent.net/comics/1303.png