skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Boy, I wish someone had asked this before.

The best posts are ones that say something surprising (e.g. not just a reporter writing a routine story about a familiar topic), and say it in a convincing way, with depth of argument, and numbers, if applicable.

Posts about how to do things oneself, and how things work, tend to be particularly appreciated. This is an audience that likes to know the details.

Posts don't have to be about hacking, so long as they talk in detail about something novel or surprising. Though arguably anything that talks about the internal details of how something works is about hacking, in the broader sense.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411994

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=406885

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418776

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414330

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418329

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414226

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414502

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418098
This site is a cargo cult dance in action:

1. You've seen highlighting on header texts and you thought it looks nice and want to add it to your copy. So, why are you highlighting what seems to be random words?

We "simplify environmental" legal obligations and "maintain your legal register." ==> We track and simplify environmental legal requirements for your business. No highlighting is required, it's already a short sentence.

Also, in your features page you start to randomly highlight things in all the paragraphs. If the highlighting is what's important, why bother writing out a whole paragraph then?

2. You've seen demos and thought it helped people. So, why does your demo video complicate things? Why do I as the end-user need to know your site used to be a textbook community? Why does the video's title-card even say textbook community? The explanation also doesn't hit home as to what your site does. In the short 2 minutes you wasted a lot of time on pointless items. Focus on quick facts and quick edits.

3. You thought public releases looks professional so you drafted one up. But your end-users -- for example, this community -- don't care. We especially don't care that you just copy and pasted that here. In just a sentence or two -- leaving out that "as web 1.0 gave way to web 2.0" -- what does your website do?

4. In your pricing and signup you just basically ripped off 37signals' recent blog post about their signup page. You even tagged your $99/month plan as your most popular plan. Really? Is this really necessary?

There are more things that needs a bit more polish, ping me for more help.
I would not argue the effectiveness of that system, but can you honestly say we should not regulate who can fly an airplane or drive a car, practice heart surgery or design bridges and buildings? Do you think an unfettered market with no regulation of these things is a good idea?
RSS as the foundation for realtime
Assume that you are a hacker, then submit stuff that interests you?
"The point of a fight is to resolve a disagreement"

I disagree. If all that's involved is a disagreement, that's almost always resolved by a discussion, as you allude to later. If someone is spoiling for a fight, the disagreement is merely a pretext, though the person wanting to fight will refuse to acknowledge that. In this case, you can refuse, as your friend did, to have the fight, or win, or lose. In a relationship, though, not having some mix of winning and losing fights, assuming that they happen frequently, will usually have deleterious effects on the relationship, and refusing to participate will eventually be seen as loss.
I can see why it's a trouble to let non-Canadians borrow; But what about investing? What's the legal trouble with letting foreigners invest through the internet? Isn't it just like opening an internet store, except the product is "Colektivo credits" or something?
Three of those links were a different color because they were not in my browser history. I immediately middle-clicked each of them.
I use a laptop all the time, so I was wondering if they had any other ways to physically bug a keyboard?
I don't think the time taken for refueling, etc is the limiting factor. There are a couple sequences of events that need to happen (simultaneously) to get the plane ready to leave.

Sequence 1: allow arriving passengers to deplane, then clean the plane, board new passengers

Sequence 2: Refueling, other maintenance

Sequence 3: load checked baggage

The time taken to ready the plane is the maximum of the times for the 3 sequences above. It seems refueling takes less than 30 minutes (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/?qid=20061018151916AAMkss8), and I'd guess the checked luggage can be loaded within 30 minutes as well.

I'm inclined to believe that deplaning, then cleaning, then boarding new passengers takes longer than 30 minutes, and boarding passengers IS indeed a bottleneck (unless there are special circumstances like deicing at the gate).
Hosting on EC2 is stupid, it's way more expensive than linode or slicehost. I accidentally left one of their extra large slices running for a month, and it cost almost $600. You can get real metal for those prices.

That said, if you have no problems setting up dedicated servers, than you won't have any problems with EC2. Use rightscale's free interface to manage instances, the rest is what you already know.
Based on a quick read of this ISO 14001 Guidance Manual http://www.usistf.org/download/ISMS_Downloads/ISO14001.pdf which states (for section 4.3.2)

Legal and Other Requirements: “The organization shall establish and maintain a procedure to identify and have access to legal and other requirements to which the organization subscribes, that are applicable to the environmental aspects of its activities, products or services.”

Is this really a big deal? I would imagine any company with an internal Wiki could comply with this by just adding a page or two.
> The problem occurs when the regulated do the regulating, whether by infiltrating the government, bribing congress, or actually writing the laws.

It's poor form to not mention that said problem always occurs.

It's also poor form to not mention that all of the monopolies/oligopolies mentioned were created and/or maintained by govt action.

Regulation is one of those govt actions. Regulation gives Walmart an advantage over every Mom&Pop because even at its best, regulation is a fixed cost that Walmart can spread over more transactions. At its typical, Walmart gets a deal that no one else gets.
Soap = fatty acid + lye. How can anyone not know this? Run water through wood ash, boil a bit to concentrate, then mix with any accessible oil. Use eye protection at all times for those trying his at home.
As always, the right solution depends on what you're building.

"Dedicated server" sounds like you're asking about one or maybe a few machines. If that's the case, you're better off with dedicated hardware from a vendor you're familiar with.

AWS is an entirely different way to build an application infrastructure. You don't keep state on any one instance because you plan for redundancy. Rather than have 1 or 2 front-end machines, you're running 1 or 2 load balancers in front of N front-end machines. If something goes awry with a front-end instance, you take it out of the loop and start another to add to the loop without downtime. It's the kind of power that up to now only companies with large IT budgets have enjoyed.
When I saw "load" in the title I thought cargo not people.

I think a great way to unload cargo is like a bomber, have the cargo in pods and just drop it into a special cargo zone and then let a truck transport it from there. Meanwhile the plane goes and drops more cargo and then back to the airport to reload.
Although Carmack developed some incredible tech in the past and has a successful (I think?) rocket building team now, he seems to have missed the mark the last few times in graphics. He also deserves some praise for the open sourcing of his old engines, but there are definitely people who have made greater contributions to graphics in recent times.

The Quake 3 engine added procedural curved surfaces which were computed on the CPU. Meanwhile, the Unreal engine simply optimized the rendering of arbitrary meshes which allowed artists to build any shaped surface they want and then let the GPU brute force it.

The Doom 3 engine added a unified lighting model based on stencil shadows. Again, this was a heavily CPU based technique while the industry was trending towards being CPU-bound. Additionally, the chosen lighting equations created a very plastic-like look. Competitors used shadow maps which are generated by the GPU and these are still the standard in speed and quality for most games today.

The latest engine he is working on is pushing "mega textures" which effectively emulate a hardware paging technique in software. "Mega textures" is the next logical step in mip-mapping, but mip-mapping has been performed by the graphics card for over a decade now. The SeaDragon team over at Microsoft Research and Live Labs built a superior version of this idea before Carmack started on this and are working actively with hardware vendors and the Direct3D team to speed it up for use in games.

Once again, Carmack has opted to trade precious CPU cycles -- better budgeted for game logic, physics, and AI -- for generality. He seems to be fighting a crusade against special cases in his engines at the expense of the games made with that engine.

There is a great reason why the Unreal Engine has been the most popular middleware platform since Quake 3...
The biggest problem with this proposal is that the airline industry's only interest is finding ways to cut costs. (And that's because price is pretty much the only thing we consider when we buy tickets.)
As to the "man-at-arms thing": if you could bring with you to the past a suitcase or so of initial supplies, what would be the best investment in the long term to become a unopposable warlord (or just an arms dealer with a technological monopoly?) Just "a bunch of guns" wouldn't help once you had given them away, and even specifications wouldn't help because no one could engineer to the required tolerances at the time. I'd think the best investment would be body armor, walkee-talkie radios, and surveillance equipment, personally.
I don't think that a new law is the correct way to address the problem. I think that such regulations would decrease progress and productivity by raising the bar to entry.

Perhaps in the future web services will start to make user contributed content easily backupable and transferable as a form competitive advantage. This wouldn't protect users from the situation where the company unexpectedly pulls the plug though.

Should blogger make users save a full backup of their blog to their local disk every time they write a post? Would users see this as a reason to use blogger vs some other service?
Holy cow -- middle clicking opens in a new tab?! I love you.
More doors.
I've never found much of a need for a GUI for version control -- especially with SVN, which has such a simple model (visualizing the revision graph for something like Monotone is useful, because it can become complex). Viewing diffs is trivial from the command-line, for example, and faster than using a GUI.
Two words: POSIX COMPLIANCE

Windows (out of the box, no additional installs) does not have this...just about every other operating system in common use does. Patching and tweaking anything (not just Ruby) to get around this can be a pain. If it seems more prevalent with Ruby than with, for example, Python, it's probably because Ruby is younger, not as widely used in IT, a hobby language for many, etc.

In my experience, Ruby-ists don't use Macs because they have something against Windows. They use Macs because they need a Unix, but also want the ease of use that comes with a commercially supported OS.
yea.. that just transformed my browsing ability, though probably not for the better :)
Is this a joke?

Uhh ... you do realize Blythe basically INVENTED the CDS right?

Maybe I am misunderstanding what you are trying to say, but ALL of the big investment firms were in on this. In fact, the system would not have failed if any one of the investment banks had not played their role.

If you are a quant we can get into arguing the fatal flaw of uncleared counterparties. But from my perspective when everyone is a counterparty, and EVERYONE was, there is nowhere to run when things go bad.

Could you clarify what you mean for me please?

Incidentally, the quote is correct, the heads of everyone from Bear to Goldman would have been summarily dismissed if they had failed to play their roles. All because of the 'innovation' of one, as it turns out, not so bright quant at JPMorgan. Astounding isn't it?
They are about to “Remote search” your PCs.

Well, actually, they are about to "Remote search" someone else's PCs; not mine.
Titanium: An Early Look at the Future of the PBW
Does anyone have any decent reference to this? All I can find is articles from blogs which are not quoting any official source on this matter. There has to be some official paper to read somewhere...
I backup to S3 using bacula and an s3sync wrapper which I made called s3-backup.py
gamasutra has a nice project page, you can post your project and get offers. never used it though..

another popular game development site is gamedev.net, you can post in their forums and may find skilled people.
Oh, and for my purposes I do daily incrementals and monthly fulls.
Reminds me of when I was simultaneously marked by the public school system as gifted and in need of special education. Some people have a hard time with the idea that there are different kinds of intelligence.
Boarding passengers takes less than 20 minutes in most cases. Even with very fast airlines like easyjet, the plane sits longer the passengers board.

Also, you know that airports queue planes, right? So a plane can't just hurry up to fill in passengers and take off.

And in any case, why? Let's say you saved enough time to make an extra trip in a single day, then it would be worth it, but this is not going to save it. So you finish your pilots workday 20 minutes earlier, this is no saving. And if you are pushing your planes that hard anyways, there is no time for proper plane maintenance and checkups.

I've done a lot of short trips within Europe by plane, and I've never observed boarding time to be an important factor.
Also calling that "remotely access and monitor any PC without warrant.", or "hacking" is an extremely big stretch, but then it's all about what sells newspapers...

Well, this is definitely criminal behavior when spammers do it. I don't see how it would be any less criminal when done by the police. If they can get a warrant, it would be a lot easier to just break down your door and take your machine. (Of course, your crypto keys won't be in memory then, which could be a problem for them.)

Anyway, get some judicial oversight, and then I don't care. If you don't have a warrant, though, this is extremely unethical. What is the point of having a legal system if it stoops to the low level of the common scammer?
I'll bet that it's not advertisers. I'll bet that it's from a branding/"facebook experience" person inside Facebook. Said person is probably confidently asserting that advertisers care, but ...

However, the policy isn't completely irrational and has some precedent. Does Playboy show breast-feeding?
MySQL: replication across VPN to server in a different state. Week's worth of daily full backups (innobackup), compressed, encrypted, periodically sent to S3. As much binlog history as we have disk to keep.

MogileFS: real-time encrypted backup to S3 (in addition to multiple local copies). This covers all of our blob-like data, keeps MySQL relatively small.

Systems: logs nightly synced to S3, otherwise no data to back up. One puppet script away from reconstruction.

Email: local server rsync in addition to procmail failsafe copies.

Code: svn master encrypted and sent to S3 nightly.

We use boto to access Amazon services.
I’ll just reply myself, maybe I’m not the only one having missed the original story (dates back to November 27 2008): http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/0...
In theory, it could be done internally and currently most companies manage it via excel spreadsheets.

The problem is three fold

1. Tracking new and updated legislation

2. Understanding existing legislation

3. Understanding changes and the impact on your operations

Those are some of the items we try to address for companies. Also, we feel our customers can benefit by sharing information with other companies who have similar operations.
Funny. Most of the time when I make this comment I get 5+ upvotes just for it, because I generally make it quite accurately on articles that are judged not desirable by others too (and the article is usually killed soon after).

I'll refrain from making it in the future if it hurts your HN experience, so this will be my last comment on the topic.

I still maintain that this article is irrelevant to this site, btw. This is reddit/r/business material - i.e. grandiose, inflammatory politico-financial opinion pieces that will result in no significant change of anything whatsoever, but get lots of upvotes and a plethora of comments that look like they make a lot of sense (until you read the response to each comment and find that someone else is making just as much sense with the exactly opposite view).

Imho, this is a fantastic waste of this site - and I shall continue to flag this kind material whenever I find it.

Edit: I'll just add that on occasion even this kind of post that you appear to dislike does generate a useful outcome, e.g.: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417744
"the Amiga ... missed on graphics and so never really attracted game developers to its platform."

I don't know about the US, but in Europe the Amiga epitomized games and multimedia development for a decade since the mid eighties (the demo scene was huge in those days).

Also, it was light years ahead of it's time on the graphics/multimedia front.
there shouldn't be anything to hide, right?

As ususal with privacy concerns, that is decidedly not the point.
I'm just curious - You say that source code is the most important thing to backup, but at the end you go on to say that there is very little business value in it. What's the distinction you're making here?
related to an earlier post today about backup, S3 snapshots of the virtual disks provides easy backup (just make sure you have it setup right - eg, it isn't a backup solution unless you test restoration).

Snapshots are also useful for testing new ideas, out of band processing (spin up an instance that processed data from a snapshot instead of hitting the main DB).

Amazon consistently improves their offerings - so if it doesn't fit right now it might next month.
Given the millions of backyard gardeners who produce yields beyond what the most productive mechanized farms of the early 20th century were capable of this claim is demonstably false. Contrary to the BS you are apparently swallowing with little skepticism from this class, modern varieties are not completely dependent upon heavy loads of fertilizer, etc. What makes them different is that when provided these addditional resources they will thrive and produce a large yield instead of shutting down and they can toldate being overcrowded (as well as having the structure to support the he's ier yield).
Solution to all of Twitter's Problems - CHARGE User's $1 a month
They probably only show it for supported OSes... I'm on a Mac, and since there's no "official" port yet, there's no Chrome adverts.

Probably the same for every non-Windows OS.
I wouldn't dare show my face in a CS-intensive interview and not know this. Fortunately, that's not my bread and butter at the moment. :-)
Thanks for the specific examples of threads you have liked. I find that I like to learn inductively. And you also described some characteristics of likeable posts, for those who like to learn deductively.
Ask HN: How can I make better comments?
Some of the comments on HN have been degrading slightly over my time on HN. I was wondering if there was a general method of how to create good an insightful comments on HN.
I've been setting up dedicated machines for years and looked into switching to AWS for TicketStumbler. I determined that it was actually considerably more expensive to obtain the same amount of resources (i.e. cpu/ram) on AWS because the pricing scheme doesn't lend itself well to having many always-on images.

In the end I chose to run Xen on top of dedicated hardware, which has essentially bought us the best of both worlds: simple scaling and low costs. Granted, it would probably take me a couple hours to start up a dozen more VMs (I'd need to requisition new hardware) as opposed to a few minutes and S3 is still cheap for mass storage, but neither of these points had any relevance to our situation.

As mentioned by others, it all comes down to what your project needs.
Obviously many people would enjoy faster boarding times, but the article barely mentions the huge problems that would come from splitting up families.

When a family's 8-year-old has the window seat, they're expected to enter the plane alone and stow their bag in the overhead compartment?

The only time this is mentioned is where it says "The outcome is fairly robust in that it's relatively insensitive to deviations because of couples or families being seated together."

So now we don't just have 18 separate boarding zones, we have some significant percentage of people in 'boarding groups' with each other. Sounds like a mess.

One of the most advantageous parts of the current system is that it works and it's (probably) not the bottleneck for departure time. Any other method would no doubt cause extra problems, at least for a while, with little to no benefit for the airline.

[edited for clarity]
Not only was the agriculture of the time primitive, but you could bring new-world plants and make a mint... Potatoes are one of the most calorie-rich crops on a per-acre basis and a modern sugar beet or super sweet corn variety would be very popular. If tobacco was not such a diificult plant to cultvate you could make a fortune from just a pocketfull of seeds and a couple of growing seasons :)
Not sure what a cargo cult dance is, but thanks for the comments, all good points.

1. Simple disagreement on style. I'll think about it.

2. The audience who is potentially interested in my site are not tech savy people. They tend to be environmental managers in traditional companies - they don't twitter, participate in forums or contribute to wikipedia. As such, we try to bridge the gap by contrasting our site with the traditional method of obtaining information on environmental legislation - a book. Yes the video needs to be better, I'm just waiting for Camtasia on Mac to rebuild it.

3. Better press release on our blog. Yes, we need to fine tune our message. Just wanted to give HN some background info on the site.

4. Duly noted.

Thanks Again.