skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Incidentally, I find it very interesting how differently you , the NYT article & dsirijus (top commenter paraphrasing but also interpreting you) are describing what is going on when people are "busy".

NYT: Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand..

You: I call it The “Work” Trap. What is it? It’s both a procrastination technique and a way of staying in your comfort zone while feeling or seeming productive.

dsirijus: procrasinating makes you fail to deliver, guilt stops you from doing anything else (hence, "busy"), and not doing anything else makes you unproductive. Rinse and repeat..
BUY BUY BUY [1]

SELL SELL SELL [2]

BUY BUY BUY [3]

[1] http://i.imgur.com/ICznv.jpg

[2] http://i.imgur.com/YeS9o.jpg

[3] http://i.imgur.com/IXsjv.png
Japan reduced energy usage fairly significantly in the summer following 3/11, to cope with the energy shortage from the missing nuclear plants. Remember, they started with rolling blackouts, and eventually got things to the point where they could cope without them.

They did this using a lot of the simple things you suggest, turning off stuff (many places got downright dim), reducing cooling, people wearing less clothing, reduced train frequency, etc.

Unfortunately this summer they seem to have given up all of that, and are simply burning a lot more oil generating electricity. I'm not sure why they didn't try to maintain the "save electricity" campaigns, because they actually were effective (some of that, no doubt, due to the implied threat: "if you don't, back to the rolling blackouts!").

[I think the "Japanese heating is inefficient" is a bit misleading -- Japanese houses are traditionally pretty poorly insulated, but they're also not very large, and tended to use localized heating (everybody huddling around a heater) instead of keeping the whole place toasty. The ultimate expression of this, of course, is the kotatsu, which reduces heating needs to a well-insulated 0.2 m^3 space focusing on everybody's feet! :) Newer buildings tend to be better heated, and hopefully they can match that with better insulation.]
€15 Million from European Commission for Tech Startups
I'm not sure I'd call plutonium metal "not that dangerous" - it is pretty toxic, can catch fire spontaneously and once if does catch fire you have to be really careful trying to put the fire out. There is an excellent book on the history of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant near Denver that describes some of the problems with handling plutonium on an industrial scale:

http://www.amazon.com/Making-Real-Killing-Rocky-Nuclear/dp/0...

Edit: Of course these things are relative. I guess compared to chemicals like chlorine trifluoride or FOOF it is pretty tame from a chemical perspective:

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_sa...
Building a product on top of another isn't the best of ideas (without having alternatives). Plus, VB is Oracle.
I'm also using Beanstalk for a (big) PHP application, it was a bit of a mess rewriting all data saving to S3, email via SES, routing with Route 53 and such stuff.

Beanstalk is not 100% matured, you see this in some unexpected behaviors like :

- changing some environment vars give unexpected troubles with the load balancers in one environment, but not in another.
- restarting an app server sometimes crashes the environment.
-etc.

the automatic procedure is that beanstalk starts replacing it's EC2 instances from your Auto Scaling Group, which sometimes has to be repeated for 2-3 times in a row which can take up to 30 mins.

in the meantime you should switch to a backup environment ( which is a must have! )

but all in all im positive because it's getting better all the time and the benefits are despite the disandvantages great.

check out the beanstalk forum :
https://forums.aws.amazon.com/forum.jspa?forumID=86
No, business.
I do not understand how this game works. All I get is a lot of squares (Opera, IE9, Chrome)
The Chase card I have for use here in Italy works fine with no chip. There's an annual fee though, so I'm not sure whether I'll keep it beyond the first year; I'll have to look and see how much it's saved me.
See the recent thread on HN, one writes a useful tool, gives it away, top voted comment on HN is a sniping comment about code style.
I have lived outside of the US for 6 years and can hands down recommend Charles Schwab Bank. All ATM fees in the US and abroad are reimbursed and there are no foreign transaction fees.
That shady private ATM in the bar charges $5 per transaction? You are totally insensitive to it.

When was the last time you walked into a bank with a checking account question? You are here on HN so I assume it is rarely or never

But...it's a debit account, so if you need a credit card this may not fit your use case.
The guy making the comment about a military response involving armored cars and heavy weapons is completely insane and should be removed from his position. He is a danger to the public.

It appears he was already fired, some allegations about fabricating evidence. He's a private investigator now.

http://articles.nydailynews.com/2003-04-02/news/18218527_1_m...

http://casaleassociates.com/
If a user on your website accidentally finds an exploit that could let him steal your user database but he didn't mean to and didn't do anything with it... do you a.) Say "well he wasn't a real threat, back to the TV" or b.) Prevent anyone else from getting in the same way?

I agree with the general hatred of security theatre, but given what it is they obviously had to be seen to fix the hole rather than just leave it wide open where any terrorist could get through it.
WinX HD Video Converter Deluxe Spanish Review
Why Keeping Mobile Devices Out of the Office is an Exercise in Futility
Why don't they just..?
Thinking Outside The Scoble: Seedcampers To Get Free Influencer Marketing
What version of Opera and Chrome? Opera 12.01 and Chrome 21 work - this is what you should see in your title bar: http://o25.img-up.net/screen1239.png
Fantastic work - I love these kinds of zany hacks. Though, this should be combined this with some "Defender of the Favicon" magic for extra gameplay options!
http://www.p01.org/releases/DEFENDER_of_the_favicon/
Yes, I agree this is what we should be working towards.

I use Facebook's 'starred friend' feature and that's helped a lot to filtering which updates I want to see. It's still not nearly custom enough though - it would be nice if I could rank 'event types' and 'friend-to-friend connection strength' myself to help the filtering a lot more. I always feel as if the automatic filtering in Top News is too general (i.e. based on update views/number of replies), instead of being specific to me.
> Why was it in a dire financial situation if it had millions of subscribers?

I've said it from the very first beginning (and got flamed for it), but IMO the business case for cloud gaming is simply very weak. If there is one at all. It requires highly specialized data centers everywhere around the world to work, and to cover the expenses you need to charge people as much or more as they would have to simply buy the hardware and games directly, and have a better game experience.

Hardware is getting cheaper and more powerful all the time, so you have to wonder why anyone should be surprised building data centers everywhere in the hope that people will pay to use them to play games, is not a very solid way to make money.
Yes, I'd very much like to hear more from author on this.
There seem to be an assumption that the prevention of distraction and “overcommunication” could only be made via technical means.

> On a daily basis, we’re exposed to hundreds of articles, tweets, emails and advertisements <…>
> We will find ways to artificially stem the constant flow of information through algorithmic summarization

It may be bad wording or misunderstanding, but I don't think we get exposed to it by some external force. There's a conscious decision one can make: which sources to check? how often? what to ignore?

I don't think the existence of technical tools and filtering algorithms would eliminate the need for these decisions.
How I Beat The Textbook Industry (With A Shoebox Contraption)
Seconded; not sure how easy it is to get one if you don't already have a brokerage account, but no annual fee, no foreign transaction fee, and no ATM fees is great. It's a debit card, but that's better for international travel, as you'll need to take out cash, and I don't think you can get credit cards that won't charge a fee for a cash advance.

(As an aside - never never change cash for travelling abroad, the commissions/spreads are ridiculous)

As for bitcoin, I feel that the volatility with respect to regular currency make a debit card not that useful unless you're an ideologue or want to speculate/easily get cash out
In Chrome 18, Opera 12.01 and Firefox 16 I also only get boxes. All on Ubuntu 12.04.
and that was the point of my reply to you , its just an attempt to lock users in to their ecosystem
From PHP to Python – my first application
I’ve been coding in PHP for years now, and even though I would stray from time to time, it was always to fix a bug or add some small bit of functionality, and never to build a site in Ruby or Python “from the scratch”.
There was also a fence, older technology but apparently it was a bigger hurdle than the million dollar system
If you have problems disengaging from your work, I strongly recommend having a go at archery. Focusing on nothing but a spot of gold way down the field does wonders for clearing your head :)
Concurrency Kit?
http://concurrencykit.org/
There are many ways to characterize or explain why people who can describe a clear path to a better life have trouble following it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia
Proper Unicode support for one.

Also, Python 3 is the new standard, by upgrading its code base to it, Django can stay relevant and up to date.

Libraries and frameworks that don't upgrade soon, will be replaced or just forgotten.
Just got another support response. Gandi told me that they now work around that issue properly so that the user doesn't get annoyed by NIC.at's policy.
Fifty Shades Generator - Lorem Ipsum Alternative
I believe that Oz and Heat (http://heat-api.org/) are built on libvirt.

I hate all these daft code names ...
OllyDbg 2.01 Beta 2 Released
Also, BitInstant, for its length, is more memorable and makes sense.
thats only because its the default app that apple uses third party developers test to see if users are interested, the creates their own version and makes it the default on their phones.
Improve Flash Builder Performance and Compile Times by 30%
Use JRocket to improve the performance of Flash Builder and the compile times of MXMLC
Yeah, or even that 'life' thing.
I had so bad experiences with Virtualbox (Dropping interfaces, crashing, ...) and switched to VMWare (Mac OS X). So I applaud the support of different providers.
I've been using the Java version of Beanstalk to run a commercial API - http://www.degreedays.net/api/ - for about 12 months.

So far it's been working out very well. I love how you can dip into the EC2 APIs if/when you need to, but it's not usually necessary as the basic setup is excellent (a load balancer in front of one or more EC2 instances - your choice of number, type, and auto-scaling rules).

The tools for updating a Java app are great. Each deployed version of your app gets stored in the AWS system, and you can rollback to any version with a couple of clicks in the AWS control panel.

It's also pretty easy to set up a staging environment to test new versions before deploying them to the live environment. Only issue I have with that is that there's no way to pause a staging environment (like you can pause an EC2 instance and not pay for it while it's paused). So you either have to keep a staging environment running all the time (paying for its EC2 instances), or set one up afresh each time you need it. The latter isn't a huge hassle, but it would be much better if you could just set one up and keep it paused for most of the time.

I think development on Beanstalk is nicely approachable, and in my experience it's been pretty reliable as well, or at least as reliable as EC2. The current version of our app has been running well, with moderate load, for several months, without so much as a restart of an EC2 instance. On two occasions 6+ months ago one of the EC2 instances went a bit screwy, having problems connecting to external URLs, but in both cases we just terminated the problem instance and Beanstalk did the rest (provisioning a replacement and putting it behind the load balancer). We could probably avoid that sort of problem in future by improving our internal monitoring (in conjunction with the beanstalk health checks that ping a URL on each EC2 instance at frequent intervals to check for problems).
The application development guide is the best place to start:
http://libvirt.org/guide/html/index.html

libvirt is (internally) complicated because it really does a huge amount of work for you [the vagrant developers will no doubt discover this over time].

The API isn't so complex, since there are only perhaps 10 calls that you need to know, plus some XML, and it's all documented in extreme detail. If anything I'd say the problem with libvirt is the documentation is too detailed, and there still aren't any good starter API tutorials.
Wondering the same thing. I read the article 3 times trying to figure out where the friends where during this fiasco.
Depends on the charges. If you're ok with around 1£ added to every transaction while you're abroad, then yes, it's a solved problem. But if you're travelling a lot and don't want to exchange the paper money and always be stuck with some change you'll probably never use again... it could be better.
Rather than just an echo chamber of praise? It's good to see multiple points of view and criticism. There's always a place for improvement, and he's right, the codebase doesn't seem particularly ruby-ish.
Sealander (Amphibian Camper)
> I've used Vagrant before, but it always felt like overkill.

I'm finding Vagrant is an indispensable tool for learning Chef and testing my recipes. Also, having a complete multi-VM setup as a development environment that replicates my production environment has its advantages.

So this is good news for me. I very much prefer VMware Fusion to VirtualBox. Can't wait till the next Vagrant release.
"Annoying because the underlying thought is "Those NASA/JPL guys are so dumb""

I have to disagree with this statement and the article. I've asked some of these questions in the past, and the reason I ask is because I'm curious, not because I'm trying to call anyone "dumb".

The fact that people try to understand the underlying technology of such a complex mission, and later followup with a "why" question, simply shows how the general public is interested in these events.

I'd be more worried if people didn't ask any questions at all, implying that they do not care for such scientific and technological breakthroughs.

Indifference can be a dangerous thing.
Great post. I'm sure at least one person is going to say "But I don't have a billion dollar budget to spend on my Earth-rover!" though.
I don't pay for support. So yes.
I have chrome 21 and I just see squares

edit: On windows 7 64 bit
He was a regular poster on comp.lang.lisp, and one of the contributors there described him thusly:

"Ken Tilton is an aquired taste - if you can ignore his inflammatory remarks his advice is usually good. When I first saw some (most!) of his posts I initially thought WTF! but think of him as someone with Tourettes Syndrome and just look at what he is saying not how he is saying it!"

There's a couple of fortune cookie files of quotes from him (collected by someone else, but you can find them on his blog), they do make for funny reading, but you can see how some of this would sting if the remarks were directed at you:
http://smuglispweeny.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/fortune-cookie-f...
Marshall: Exact real arithmetic based on Dedekind reals
VxWorks was chosen because it does what it says on the tin.
It's the usage, not the internals, I find overcomplicated.

Every time I've looked at it, I've just ended up writing a small shell script to do what I needed instead rather than having to deal with the convoluted XML config and read through massive amounts of documentation.
I had the same reaction. "Why don't they just" questions are essential to understanding engineering, and we should, if anything, encourage them.
There are perfectly valid reasons to ask questions like this: you may be genuinely curious or confused about the issue. If something seems obviously odd to me it usually means I'm missing some piece of information needed to understand. Having somebody explain what circumstance I'm unaware of is extremely useful and enlightening. If I ask a question like this it's to get a better feel for the problem space rather than to imply any sort of incompetence on the part of whomever I'm asking about.

The real problem is that it's hard to tell the people asking questions like this out of truly interest apart from the people being undeservedly condescending.

I suppose the most important thing is to phrase questions like this carefully and to be polite. I think it's also useful for the answerer not to assume bad faith unless it's very overt. A presumption of reasonableness from everyone would markedly improve discussions about projects like the Mars rover which generally contain very useful information and insight but can get side-tracked by the very issues this article talks about.
Awesome info hunting work there. :)

The one thing that strikes me as a bit batty from the 'CIA is going to kidnap him camp' is that in the cases of rendition the victims generally do not end up on US soil, in US courts.

Much rather in another country who's legal is system is more opaque (or transparent depending on your version of crime and punishment)

Given the US desire to put Assange on trial you'd figure they'd do the public legal stuff.
I've read somewhere that the natural sleep regime for human is to sleep for a few hours after the night come, wake up and be active for 1-2 hours around midnight, and then go back to sleep and only weak up in the morning.

There: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep
Does the ratio of users to repositories seem strange to anyone else? This to me looks like each user has around 1.5 repositories. This seems quite small?

On average most accounts I've seen have far more than 1 and a half repositories.
If you're writing or editing XML, then you're probably doing it wrong (which to be fair could be a problem with the documentation). You should probably be using commands like:

virsh start MyGuest

To create guests: virt-install, virt-manager, Boxes, Heat, OpenStack or one of the many other libvirt users. None require XML editing.

In any case, that's not an issue for the topic here. The Vagrant developers will certainly need to read up some libvirt API documentation, but once they have made the sensible decision to use libvirt, then that will be completely hidden inside Vagrant, and wouldn't affect end users of Vagrant in any way.

I added a libvirt backend to libguestfs (previously we were managing KVM processes by hand). The change is completely transparent to libguestfs users.
Cookie Tossing
Doesn't work for me either in Aurora (Firefox 16) or Chrome 21 beta (on Windows 7).
Regarding #4; it would be nice to see someone pursuing a project to put a set of comms satellites in orbit around Mars to significantly improve this coverage.

If we are going to be making these efforts at Mars in the future (whether autonomous or manned) it seems worth the investment :)
The opinion of the English courts is based on representations of the Swedish prosecutor on the express basis that the extradition does not need to concern itself with what evidence there is to support those representations.

In other words, it says nothing about whether or not there is a sufficient basis for charging him in Sweden, nor about whether the proseutors office will actually feel confident enough to actually go through with charges if they get hold of him.

It only says that if the Swedish prosecutor does indeed have sufficient evidence to get a Swedish court to charge him based on claims supporting the same allegations she has made in the EAW, then it would also be a crime in England and Wales.

Which raises the question of why Marianne Ny has doggedly insisted on carrying out this case in a manner that has prevented it from moving forward, nor tried to get him charged in absentia, which the Swedish system most most certainly allows her to do.
Fairly big difference between asking "Why don't they...?" and "Why don't they just...?". The 'just' tacked onto the end of the beginning of the question implies it should be totally obvious.
Blogging is forever
I get the cop on the left and "squares" in the tab. While a cute idea it is not all that interesting as it sits in a single tab with Firefox. So the whole display is very tight as I have eight tabs.

Then there is the whole, just spam spacebar for the win.
Sorry, what?

Life is awesome, the sky, the sea, ice cream - all of it.
I'm only sorry that I don't get to stay here longer.

Sure we suffer sometimes, and some people suffer more than others. But to insist that we stop reproducing in an attempt to end human life just to avoid pain...

And as for purpose, find your own purpose.
If you're ok with around 1£ added to every transaction while you're abroad, then yes, it's a solved problem.

How about £0? That's a solved problem too. In the parts of the world with a working, modernized banking system and proper competition.

I could chose to be part of those who got charged £1. I chose not to, and so did so many others, that where I live, finding a bank which charges you money at all to withdraw anywhere in the world is the exception, not the rule.

There may be merits to bitcoin (although I do admit I have very little knowledge, insight or understanding of the system), but you don't need it to have working banking institutions and free trade. That I do know.
Yep just squares here for a few seconds and then game over (Chrome 21.0.1180.79 on Win7 x64)
Also people don't really share NASA's motivation. Mostly we just like looking at Mars, and if that was NASA's motivation they probably could have designed a better rover by swapping in cameras later in the process.

Dumb questions can have interesting answers. Even if people don't ask them nicely.
Data Jujitsu: The Art of Turning Data into Product [free report]
here is a basic lisp interpreter written in python:
https://github.com/keithgabryelski/plisp
The Anatomy of a perfect Website
NodeJS Video Chat WIP
Chrome 21, Windows 7. Only see squares.
"Basic elementary concept, if you don't get this, you should not be coding yet."

The target audience of his book has just learned what a variable and an array is. Since the book as advertized as learning "the hard way," it seems to explicitly attempt to give an insight to what the computer is doing when you tell it to do something.

That is, I sure as hell could translate a for loop to psuedo-assembly, and I could probably teach a newbie how to do the same for their mental model. I don't even begin to think how I would teach them what the computer is doing conceptually.

The target audience of his book is not coding yet. What, should we require a comprehension and vocabulary test before they test something out in a REPL?

As such, I would say Zed's pedagogy is sound.