skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You misunderstand.

Austerity is not about the absolute expenditures of government, it's about the change in (real) expenditures of the government over time.
Getting out of dodge.

Maybe this is why he was brief: His point is a potentially unpopular one.

It is just a very interesting topic. One that few who are successful would dare to explore in depth.

It would be interesting to hear how his brief remarks were received. Did people like what he had to say?
Wiki.dbpedia.org - The Wiki API
There is no innovation for a decade, only decreased profits.

Decreased profits are an innovation. Clearly the market was overpriced. It's the same as buying a new machine and decreasing your costs.

Creating wealth is not "building something" directly. I think this is where you are confused. Creating wealth is "acquiring something". This could be a physical item or something nondescript like time.
There Comes A Time When a Startup Has To Grow Up
If I'd never applied myself, and thus never had success myself...

You're discounting the possibility of applying yourself and still not having success, which is really the whole point. Your argument is that those who fail will be more likely to blame luck, while Lewis' point is that those like you who succeed are more likely to overly credit their own effort. You're probably both right to some extent, but given that human physiological traits have a Gaussian distribution and wealth is distributed according to a power law, it would seem Lewis' view is closer to the truth.
Because I value the product more than I value the distribution channel. If you can deliver me interesting, in-depth reporting, then I'll pay for it and I honestly don't care how you get it to me.
Many recent tech (and non-tech) IPOs are also down significantly (FB, YELP, ZNGA, etc). So while Groupon does have some unique problems, it's also tracking not far off its peer group. But I know HN loves to hate on Groupon.
Dropbox founder talks about the company's early days
You can if you make them small enough. I don't think any of us know what the classified state of the art is.
Correct it for inflation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

Also, consider the fact that congress allocates the money going to individual project, not just the agency as a whole. NASA is not doing just fine.
i would say it's a difference, but opt-in is always a good way to go. I always (atleast, i think so) I make most optins consciously).

I would say everyme has a good TOS/Priv Stmt, compared to google, if it says "this privacy policy stands forever, and will not be changed". I know you can't promise that, and I will not ask you to, but that's only case where I would have more trust for keeping the data with you compared to google's. Or I would trust goog's policies better it addresses the legal aspect of it, while being humanly readable and understandable.

The only thing that differentiates you (as in everyme, most references are same)and goog is they have to cover base for billions of people they are handling.

Even if it's snarky (though I didn't make it so), why would someone downvote it rather than disagree with a comment (HN guidelines please). Please downvote if it doesn't add to discussion. What we had above is discussion.
Even sadder, Triana costed only 1/3 of what is spent on the war in Afganistan each day. I would prefer to see people in NASA enjoying wide arrays of 15K drives, competitive salaries, and business class seats...
And that is exactly why whenever someone wants book recommendations here, I always recommend Max Gunther's two books about luck. That.
Thanks Bjorn!
That would take care of the hosting, but of the actual usage of the tool.
"The satellite's original purpose was to provide a near-continuous view of the entire Earth and make that live image available via the Internet."

Don't believe a word this scumbag is saying. Yeah, they would give you one per day 10x zoomed photo, while giving NSA/TSA/CIA 24/7 life-feed of what you and 3 other billion people living on this side of Earth are doing.
The Commissioning
Does anybody know if the famous Google "offer" was subject to due diligence?

I'm speculating here: I doubt that the Google corporate dev team, after looking at Groupon's books (post NDA), would of kept the $6bn price tag, and if they did it would have been subject to considerable reps & warranties.
It's a superlatively false narrative to image that "sense random opportunity" is the only (or even common) scenario and that "work your ass off" is its only response.
Scoble updates what's going on at StumbleUpon
We have one at YC showing HN stats. It has become the focus (= hearth) of the room.
I'm not sure I follow. I'm not telling a story here, just pointing out a funny tie in from a piece of pop culture. There's probably something more subtle that I'm missing, because I'm dense like that :)
Let's Not Get Carried Away: Anti-Depressants Really Do Help People
Huh, but I thought Groupon had finally had the ship turned in the right direction and was profitable?

http://www.businessinsider.com/wait-wasnt-everyone-just-sayi...

I don't understand much about investment markets, but shouldn't that raise investor confidence or is there something else going on?
You should have calculated for inflation. Without it, your numbers appear misleading.

7.5 billion in 1987 is the equivalent of 15.1 billion today.

So they've had no effective increase in budget. Which helps us to choose the right question: Are they doing more today than they were doing in 1987? And what could they do with more budget?
wow, great! what is your scripting language?
I assume Microsoft's Office for iOS/Android is just a slightly adapted webview of the online version.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that you need NAND gates and a clock? Identifying a minimal set of primitive components necessary to implement a self-timed computer would be a more interesting problem.
Building two is hardly twice the cost. The design and development work has surely got to be more costly than fabrication, assembly and installation.

Not that this nit-pick changes the nature of the discussion.
I'm in AZ. We have tons of budget cuts going on around here. They might not affect federal courts, though. There are enough things going on that it's hard to keep track, really, which is why I asked.

http://sunshinereview.org/index.php/Arizona_state_budget
I consider it a sign of intelligence to be able to speak about complex issues in a plain and straightforward manner.
Read-It-Later started as an article bookmarking system, and then pivoted to be like Instapaper (article parsing and delivery to a mobile app). Calling Read-It-Later older than Instapaper is like calling Bing older than Google. Bing is an evolution of msn search and Microsoft is older than Google.

Calling Instapaper a simile of Read-It-Later stikes me as misleading.
Downvoting should be reserved for comments that violate site guidelines, but many people prefer to censor opinions they disagree with rather than address them. If you disagree with a post, write a response or upvote an existing response that already articulates your argument.
I'm obviously opinionated on this point (backbone/underscore user), it just seems like it comes with so much i wont ever user - and could easily add via a mixin on a per project basis (in a nice functional manor). I also can't get over extending the native prototypes. Dealing with too many moving parts in modern web apps to go and start extending things that weren't built that way - maybe in the ruby world it just feels better to have it on the prototype directly. I suppose im getting off topic tho.

This lib (joosy) was built to satisfy your particular set of needs, and it seems that it does so well. Cheers to that.
well there's still time....."LOOK OUT BELOOWWWW!"
I can give a very simple explanation of how luck is a part of the equation of success for anyone who has ever been born. The distribution of opportunity is clustered in certain locations. It is not even.

To be born in a country with equal opportunity, libraries, free education, water, electricity, non dictators. That is lucky.

Wealth arguably follows a log normal distribution. This means all the benefits combine multiplicatively, so that even seemingly small differences in the positive will combine to give a substantial advantage.
Original quote:

>"the conference organizers should not have blinked before ejecting the responsible party from the conference."

Shoot first, ask questions later?

This is a problem, and not a world I want my wife or children to be part of, that simple.
I wouldn't complain too loudly. Otherwise, next time, they'll quietly dispose of such things, rather than risk public backlash.
Mediocrity is Just a Thousand Hours Away
Nobody wins the lottery without playing, and playing requires some level of work to manage the variables (when to buy, where to buy, what to play, how much to spend, etc.). Why does a lottery win have to be pure luck? Why is it not fair to say those choices you made are what lead to the success? Heck, if you work hard enough, you might win several times[1]. The contrast you are trying to highlight is just not clear to me.

[1] http://macedoniaonline.eu/content/view/18821/61/
It should be easy to port it - docopt is only 366 LOC itself.
Just because one person values something at a number doesn't mean anyone else (or enough other people) do. The price of their shares tell you the "Current Market Value," but they don't tell you what it is worth in the long term.

Things are only worth what the next person is willing to pay for them, not what the last person actually paid. People buying the Groupon IPO were mostly going with the "greater fool" theory of investing. A money losing company with lots of accounting issues is not something that generally just goes up and up in value.
Perhaps we can even splurge on SSDs with that kind of money. Spinning disks are so obsolete when we're talking that much cash.
The Endangered Culture of the Spreadsheet
Demoing as we speak. Great product.
Redbox is a movie rental vending machine (AFAIK there are not any stores). You don't really need to ever wait in line for it in my experience. There is a redbox at almost every drug store in my area so it's much more convenient than paying the outrageous XBL prices.
This is truly a great book and I can't recommend it enough. I've been working through the projects for the past couple weeks.

As the author states, it can be hard for CS students to see the forest for the trees among all the computing topics. I know that while I was learning these topics individually I never took the time to step back and really connect them.

With TECS you get to build each layer and define a an interface between them from logic gates to virtual machines, to compilers, to operating systems, etc. In the end you have a fully functioning computer that you have built from scratch. By removing all the "magic" from the system I feel like I have a much deeper understanding of these topics than I did before.
Ask HN: What is the best video hosting solution for a small startup?
I'm working on a project this summer that involves user-submitted videos. It just seems like there's a barrage of solutions out there and it's difficult to gauge which ones work better than others. What video hosting solutions have you used in the past? Or which ones do you think are best?

I have some programming experience, so I'm capable of working with an API or framework. However, I'd prefer as little hassle as possible. The solution I choose needs to be scalable (so tiered pricing packages or something of the sort). I would prefer both flash and html5 player options, as well as player customization. Users need to have the ability to upload videos that are attached to their accounts, which probably necessitates some sort of upload API. Also, I'm working with a small budget of a couple thousand dollars to start.

That about sums it up. Any advice/suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Towards 14,000 write transactions per second on my laptop
Its amazing how self-defensive some successful people can become about their socioeconomic status. An implication that luck had any more than a very minor contribution is blasphemous. Some can become outraged at the suggestion that they might own one penny that wasn't earned fair and square. Completely on their own, with no help from anybody. Not even scholarships count as help (they're earned).

And for some reason, admitting that one received assistance from one's parents is taboo. Just look at the Romney campaign for a prominent example:

"I could have stayed in Detroit like him and gotten pulled up in a car company," Romney said at the debate. "I went off on my own. I didn't inherit money from my parents. What I have, I earned. I worked hard, the American way."[1]

1: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jan/...
That change is positive, if you include the transfer payments that Krugman has excluded.
7 days left to apply for NYCEDC ‘LatAm to NYC’ program
Google buys Meebo
Knowing where the exits are
Every time I read about this, I instantly wonder whether this means that I can turn my crappy consumer camera into a spy device.

We have windows that span about fifty feet in the office, and a hotel across the street; if someone left the complimentary bible in the window open to a random page, could I combine multiple exposures into an image detailed enough to read the text?
Re: making it longer. I think it was pretty much spot on in terms of length. This is a speech at graduation/commencement, nobody wants to hear someone yammer on and on and on. He had a point, which he illustrated with 3 concise examples (Liar's Poker, Moneyball, the Berkeley study). He could elaborate, certainly, but I don't think this was the forum for it. Maybe he'll find a venue in which to elaborate at some other time, but I think this pretty much perfect.
I agree: Mongoid is great.

I haven't done this in a few years, but Datamapper had the nice capability to map a singe model classes to multiple backends (e.g., use PostgreSQL for some attributes, MongoDB for others).

PostgreSQL and MongoDB cover most of my data store requirements and are a pleasure to use.
Oh well, even though it's the second time around, I missed the first one!

Nice article nevertheless, upvote for the effort!
Let me flip it around. You said, "I wouldn't build a serious site on top of anything that didn't have some sort of built-in sharding story".

I think the opposite. Most serious sites will never need sharding.
I'd say he's being downvoted for responding to the title, but not the content of the speech. Maybe the first reference to Goldman was a typo, but then repeating and insisting on that mistake? (Why not go back and check?) Calling the speech an article. People will conclude nirvana at best skimmed it. If you haven't read and understood the material, don't comment on it.
DNS load is typically fairly light, because it's just a few packets per hit. You certainly don't need 6x redundancy, and if one server gets most of the traffic it's probably no biggie.

There are a couple of caveats to your load balancing strategy. With enough headroom, these probably aren't total game breakers, but you should be aware of them. More at http://serverfault.com/questions/60553/why-is-dns-failover-n...

1) You shouldn't expect even or consistent load balancing across servers. Some caching DNS servers (such as those at large ISPs) have very many downstream consumers, and they won't do any randomization. If a large DNS server sees a new order of records, it might trigger a synchronous switch of 10% of your customer base from one server to another. This will cause spiky traffic.

2) You can't rely on any kind of sticky sessions. This may or may not be a problem, and many load balancers drop this guarantee as well for performance reasons, but it is certainly possible that a client may see a DNS records TTL expire and switch to a new IP. If you aren't prepared for that you may start dropping sessions.
Perhaps you were lucky to be in a situation where you had the opportunity to work hard and it could make a difference.

A lot of people are born with very limited opportunities. If you were born a healthy male in France in 1895, you were probably dead or maimed at 23, regardless of how hard you or your parents worked.
I don't think the average consumer cares about their data being sold. There is a vocal minority of users that cares about online privacy, but I don't this isn't going to cause a mass exodus from Facebook. Seems more like a publicity stunt to me.
I don't think this means much anyway. If you're buying Groupon stock, you're probably going long anyway. Every company has their low points.
That's what has me curious. The Hubble isn't designed to point at earth and would be of little use if we tried. Why does the US Military have telescopes that are on par with Hubble? Are they looking out into space as well? Why would they do that?
Google is acquiring messaging and advertising service Meebo
You're kind of asking the question wrong. In my mind it should be "Is it worth investing time and energy in developing Windows apps".

Metro apps are a mix of HTML/CSS/JS along with the existing frameworks for the deeper function stuff. The existing frameworks for the deeper stuff are used throughout the eco system. They apply to much more than just Metro apps. So even if Metro apps fail, you'll still have a useful knowledge base to develop plain old Windows apps, or web apps.
Understanding Bind and bindAll in Backbone.js
Before we wrote our new policy, I looked into this myself because I wondered if we could do without. In the US/Canada and some other places, it's not necessary to have a Privacy Policy (in the EU, it is) depending on what your site does. However, if a user is providing you with data, it is required by privacy laws to let the user know what you will do with it, what you are soliciting from them, and other basic things. For example, EU laws require that we alert the user that we use cookies to keep sessions for users, and how they may turn them off. I would love to have left out things that are obvious but we are required to include certain sections.
Google Acquires Meebo for $100M
In France, anlthough we don't have a Netflix app on the XBox, we have Canal+/CanalSat/CanalPlay apps which really brings the XBox as a cablebox contender. Added to that, there are also TF1 and M6 apps, and I expect more coming in the future. The general feeling here is that whatever Apple wants to make with the Apple TV, they will have to make it happen soon enough, else the XBox will capture a sizable part of that market.
1. NASA's budget has been cut every year since 1998, as a fraction of the federal budget, although their budget in dollars has increased[1].

2. Krugman doesn't count some expenditures, such as social security, unemployment benefits and a number of other items. He argues on his blog why this paints a more accurate picture. (Search for "Austerity")

3. SpaceX is an exceptional startup and NASA has been in business since the 60s. A typical web startup can outpace IBM and Microsoft too. It's better to compare NASA's inefficiency with other big research labs.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
And if you recursively click the first link in Wikipedia articles, you end up at philosophy :)

My point is that if you dedicate a lot of time thinking about any particular aspect of life, you end up back at the "Getting to Philosophy" problem. Your luck comes in shades of grey. At some point, the line between black and white is drawn rather arbitrarily.

Would I consider myself "lucky" to be born in the US? To be born at all? Sure, why not. It's at least a statistical significance. But that stroke of luck was just the basis from which I built my relative level of success. The same is true for any starting point. The more relevant question is, does it really matter?

I wouldn't say that contemplating the deeper meaning of one's own "luck" is a waste of time, but obsessing over it is foolish. While you're busy contemplating how lucky you are, the other person is busy positioning themselves to succeed.
Unfortunately you have to be a cable/satellite subscriber to view NBC's online offering this year

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/05/02/151797...
Maybe they righted the ship and now everyone sees their sustainable profit is below what they thought it would be.
Ask HN: How do you convert your emails to todo items?
I'm looking for specifics on tools and workflows you might use.

I currently use Evernote to maintain my todos and tasks in a somewhat GTD way (I basically did this when it was on HN before http://ruudhein.com/evernote-gtd).

The problem is that I have two email solutions (gmail for personal and Outlook for work) and a lot of the emails I get become tasks. I want to keep the context of the email, so ideally I want a way to keep the whole thread, including updates.

For gmail I can copy/paste a link to the thread. I haven't found a good solution for Outlook yet (it should be noted that I can use any imap solution, so using another client is an option).

So, HN, how do you unify your email and tasks?
>> they don't tell you what it is worth in the long term

This reminds me of the Keynes quote: "The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead."

More on topic, the long run as an abstraction is limited in its utility for investors. This mostly because investors (like gamblers at a roulette wheel) have to place their bets while the wheel is spinning. Without taking a position on GRPN, I'd say that the "long run" verdict is hardly in at this point.
Carmageddon: Reincarnation... "Work In Progress" sneaky peek
I believe you meant "would have."
Would be great if there were more examples of what has been done with the API on the homepage.

They should market this towards manufacturing companies...

Or I could see it doing really well in high performance computing... Setup a dashboard to monitor compute clusters...

I really need to play with this!
WSJ: Google to launch new service for local businesses as early as July
On the Perfect Paas: CloudFoundry vs Heroku vs dotCloud vs Nodejitsu
While "HN loves to hate on Groupon" isn't wrong, it (probably intentionally) implies that it's a HN-specific hive mind thing - whereas to me it seems the hate it based on plenty of pretty logical and objective issues with Groupon's business practices.

I'm sure not everyone has the same view, but my feeling is that a.) those who don't hate on Groupon can at least appreciate why people do and not think it idiotic and b.) it's not specifically about HN people
Uh...look at this thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnR8fDW3Ilo

This is made by Festo, a German industrial automation company. They did this for a trade show.

It was "for fun".

Imagine what we're capable of building for spying on China. I doubt we're having problems with it.
Which requires that you login to their system with your credentials to your cable/satellite provider.
You have a good point. I must admit that after many years of using and loving PostgreSQL I have never had to scale it out: that is outside of my experiences.

On the other hand, old fashion MongoDB master slave configurations and now replica sets have been easy for me to set up when on just a few occasions I had to use a scaled out MongoDB setup.
> I'm wondering where the rest of the community was when this harassment was going on at the bar. The victim says they were there in a group. So a whole group of conference attendees was just standing around, letting this victim be harassed?

From the post this read like a really uncomfortable /inappropriate conversation between two people, not a violent + public confrontation.

What do you expect other bar patrons to do? Listen in and chase the guy out of the bar because he made inappropriate advances? Do I need to point out that this behavior is fairly common in bars?

Look, not questioning that what the guy did was inappropriate but I think this expectation on the rest of the community is not reasonable.