skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've noticed a lot of people who talk about "the cloud" really have no idea what they are talking about. I've been trying to move parts of my agencies' infrastructure to the Cloud for some time so let me dispel a few myths.

(For the record, contrary to this article's title the bottleneck for me has been management all the way)

Cloud Computing is not easy: The person below who claims you can get a cloud application up in a week has clearly never tried to put a mission critical cloud application up at all. Managing virtual servers can be as hard if not harder than actual servers in many cases because you have to automatically track a bunch of items that would normally be static (is the server active, does it have an ip, if so what is that ip, if not you need to assign an ip and then automatically track that ip, etc...)

The Cloud is not necessarily standardized: The above example looks at environments such as Amazon which are hard to maintain because of all the virtual up and down happening. The other end of the spectrum would be services like Microsoft Azure. Azure is easy to use but it's a platform that has to be written to. You write an application in Azure and you have to rewrite significant parts of it to take it somewhere else.

The Cloud is not always cost efficient: The Cloud is only cost efficient up to the point where you can afford to fill a server person's time. Once that happens having a full time server person becomes more cost effective.

Management IS NOT going to be the one pushing this: The article claims IT should adopt Cloud Computing or Management will. Unlikely. In my experience Cloud computing makes people very, very, very nervous. Let's put all our data on someone else's server does not go over well on its own. Add that to the fact that management types have been trained by the world to think "outsourcing = more expensive" (which is true in non-tech areas) and you have a very steep uphill battle.

Sorry for the long comment but a lot of this Cloud hype is getting out of hand. I'm in favor of Cloud computing but we have to remember it's a tool to solve some specific problems. NOT a tool to solve every problem.
> All ideographic writing systems are a horrible mistake.

Practically, yes; functionally, no. I recall there was research on the phonetic activation (and thus dependence) during reading of Chinese hieroglyphs: as predicted, there was less phonetic activation.

There are some characters I cannot pronounce, but know the meaning of. It's a strange sensation, but very efficient.
One thing that annoys me about coffee shops is how unfriendly people are. Mostly peering into laptops. I'd like to go to a coffee shop where people go explicitly to engage in interesting/random conversation with strangers.
Smithsonian Institution Oral History Interview with Steve Jobs (1995)
Sousa was quite aware of Henry Ford. Sousa's point is that superior recorded music pretty much destroyed "music in the small".

Music isn't much like an axe handle. Is teaching?

Don't get me wrong - I think that distributing good lectures is a great thing. Rock-star lecturers will do extremely well and ordinary ones will have to find something else to do.

However, there's more to education than lectures. The question is what happens to the rest and to education as a whole when lectures come through a separate channel.
police call google

police: "did y IP make x queries on n?"

google: grep x /logs/y.log

google: yes

police: cool. He tried to obscure the search, but was thwarted by a simply text search in the logs.
I can only dream about the possible applications I could build with this sensor.
Ask HN: which way to go for bulk image uploading?
currently working on a photography-related project, I need a robust solution for bulk image uploads. After dabbling with a commercial solution called MultiPowUpload I ran into serious problems when uploading from a Mac. Eventually I found out, that these problems are not limited to this uploader but seem to occur with most flash-based uploaders together with flash player v.10.

The alternative would be something like the Aurigma software (you probably know it from Facebook and some other big sites) but I'm hesitant, because it requires an ActiveX- or Java install from the user. On the other hand it offers to resize files on the client side, allowing faster uploads and saving quite some bandwidth.

I also hat a look at SWFUpload, which lets you control almost every aspect of the uploader and even has Javascript callbacks on all events. But it looks a bit complicated and before I dive into that, I would like to hear your advice: which way would you go to build a robust bulk upload solution for your website?
It depends on how often you need to write scripts of this sort. If you only write them once in a while, you're probably fine with using two commands, but if you write scripts all the time, it's worth it to know how to do them succinctly.
Despite Accord With Apple, Music Labels Still Fret
My only complaint with Zsh's tab completion, which is usually far superb compared to Bash, is that package-name completion is much slower in Zsh as compared to Bash, at least on the Debian and Ubuntu systems that I use. Typing `aptitude install build-<Tab>` in Bash almost immediately completes "build-essential", but Zsh can take anywhere from 3-15 seconds to search through the package cache before completing the same package name.

Other than that, I absolutely love Zsh's completion system, and the awesome capabilities it provides, like context-sensitive Git argument completion, such as `git add <Tab>` listing only the files that are either changed since the last commit, or not yet tracked by Git. Insanely useful!
I've never heard of GoDaddy doing this (heard of someone else who did though), and I've personally bought hundreds of domains from GoDaddy (and many times a few days or weeks after the initial search).

I do dislike some things about them (the cleavage in the ads is a cheap trick and their UI is terrible), but:

1. Great prices.

2. Amazing support(for the price).

3. I respect Bob Parsons and really enjoy reading his blog posts which always share hard data which is rare and helpful.

4. It works! (I have a number of servers with them and hundreds of domains and it's been 100% reliable for me in the past 5+ years)

If GoDaddy had an API so I could develop an alternative UI for their services, I would never consider leaving them (besides hosting--for big sites I use other providers).
> The Cloud is not always cost efficient: The Cloud is only cost efficient up to the point where you can afford to fill a server person's time. Once that happens having a full time server person becomes more cost effective.

Actually, it's a server team's time. Server persons sleep, go on vacation, and so on.

As the tools get better, that "amount to fill" keeps getting larger and larger.

And, what are the odds that your team is as good as Amazon's?

That said, your team cares about your stuff more than Amazon's team does.
Might be good enough reason to have RF-shielded "holders" for your passport or any other RFID nuggets you have in your purse or wallet.
Fair enough on the team concept. Though I think you could get by with one server person when you have a technical staff that could fill in during vacations et al. But you're right, it certainly requires more than one.
"The voice was me as 'Vinnie' threatening my life. "

It sounds like he's developing harassment-ware.
Linux Magazine hacked or just DOS'd itself with latest email?
picture here: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3368/3247416097_0596eef189.jpg
Music isn't much like an axe handle.

Artisan made:

Instances are produced one at a time. The quality varies wildly and is usually poor. The cost is high.

Machine made:

The design is perfected, and then limitless high-quality copies are made. The cost is low.

What is the relevant difference between axe-handles and music?

Is teaching [much like an axe handle]?

Yes. The above applies to teaching, as well as to music and axe-handles.

there's more to education than lectures. [...] what happens to the rest

Interactive educational software.

distributing good lectures is a great thing.

By the way, lectures are often written by pharmaceutical companies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmaceutical_industry#Controv...

Lecture scripts and even journal articles presented by academic researchers may actually be 'ghost-written' by pharmaceutical companies.
That the amount of debt in the world grows unchecked.

The video did not do a great job of explaining what happens when debt is repaid. Let's say that the amount of bank-created money is defined as the total amount of money in everyone's account, minus the total amount in the bank's vaults. When one makes a payment on a loan, the payment is always part interest and part principal. The latter is dropped into the vault, and does not appear in anyone's account. So, this actually constitutes a removal of bank-created money from the system. The interest becomes revenue for the bank; the bank is a business and it should make money just like any other business. That revenue is used to pay the bank's operating expenses, dividends to the shareholders, and interest to all the depositors. So, it's not constantly accumulating in the hands of a wealthy few.

And that brings up another important point that the video neglected to mention. Debt may increase exponentially, but so do savings.

The other important detail left out is that payments are made with government-created money. Banks cannot print paper money... only the government. So the money in your wallet was not created by the bank. When your ATM served that money, the bank had to provide real cash. When you write a check, the bank has to transfer real money (entries on the Fed reserve's books) to the other bank. However, there are systems in place to reduce the amount of government-created money necessary (intra-bank transfers don't require any at all... inter-bank transfers are aggregated and canceled out where possible). So, the payments you make paying off your mortgage happen with government-created money, and do decrease the total amount of money and debt in the system.
The Lecture System in Teaching Science, and My Discovery of the "Gutenberg Method" (1986)
PR companies can charge anywhere from a couple hundred to thousands of dollars. It all depends on what you are looking for and the services you require. If you just want a simple press release and it distributed to the major wires you are looking at a few hundred (the wire services charge a fee based on the length or number of words in your release). Contrary to popular belief you do not need a PR company to get your press release on the wires. Where a PR company can be helpful with press releases is to get major reporters to cover your story. They do this typically through preestablished connections with those reporters.

While press releases are not the only service PR companies offer they are a good part of it. Many PR companies offer additional services such as website review (functionality & design), copy editing for your website, media training, and help with your overall marketing efforts.

As I said before costs can range from a few hundred to several thousand, but most PR companies will want you to engage them with a monthly retainer. The retainers for reputable firms can run from $10-20K a month.

For startups I would highly recommend against engaging a PR company. Everything you will need as a startup you can do yourself or by hiring a college student to handle for you. Your main concerns in a startup environment typically will be to make sure your website makes sense and is clear, building connections with bloggers who have an interest in your space, and utilizing those connections to get the word out. The wire services are a waste of time really. Your story is not going to make it in the NY Times are Washington Post by releasing a press release on the wires.
Disruptive Innovation, Applied to Health Care
Japanese Designs That Could Go Global
Revver and Pageflakes go dark for days
Oh, I truly believe it. Perhaps I was too terse and should have expanded a bit.

It seems self-evident to me that if a man is using porn heavily for self-gratification, he's not going to view a randomly-met woman as a whole person (and vice versa? I don't really know), but instead will be judging her based on how "hot" she appears to him, or how she might feed his fantasies. (That's the "just body parts" in my original quip.)

This is tremendously corrosive for society as a whole, and both sexes suffer the results.

There was a HN link a while back (Three Myths about Porn: http://www.reuniting.info/science/three_myths_about_porn) which I think made a pretty good argument that online pornography is like crack cocaine to the male brain--a complete overload of normal circuits. (Even if the point of the containing site is, um, rather bizarre.) And it leaves many, many men hopelessly addicted.
I offer a 120% guarantee at SmartFlix.com.

I've only had one customer ask for it.
IMO, the real problem is still the abundance of cheep land.
How wasteful. There are already almost a hundred satellite internet providers that cover Africa, and the monthly charges are less than $100 a month for a reasonable connection that can be shared across 10 computers.

This system has been used in Africa for at least 4 years, which is when I first saw it, together with WLAN distribution nodes using directional antennae.

How does google manage to spend $700 a month on this?

Furthermore, even if you hook up the satellite dish to a solar panel, what powers the computers then? And why do you need to import 3 foreigners for a task that has been done locally for years already?
Two years after Vista launch, 71% of business PCs still running XP
And I can confirm this, occasionally we get picked by TC etc. If you're a small startup and not counting on some huge PR-effort and launch event you probably have nothing to lose if you contact some smaller bloggers. That way you usually atleast have coverage and might gain some interest in what you're doing.

(btw. ArcticStartup covers Scandinavia/Baltic startups so we in the local category)
Best part of the article is the end ...

"In some ways, the tension stems from Apple’s power over the industry, but it also echoes the traditional divide between suppliers and distributors. Several years ago, some labels withdrew their videos from the Yahoo Music service over a dispute about compensation. Before that, when MTV began in the early 1980s, the music industry eagerly provided videos in the belief that they would help sell records, though they later regretted having provided free content for the cable channel.

They believe they created MTV, and will say they revived Apple,said Mr. Goldberg, speaking about the music industry in general."
Is Apple about to release a new iPhone?
The last post on that thread is an excellent and very thorough blow-by-blow debunking of this trashy "documentary".
Graph: Internet Population Distribution
Technical arguments aside, this is one of the most levelheaded language/framework rants I have seen in a long time. I wish more people ranted like this. But I guess they wouldn't call it a rant then.
I generally take the definition of "premature optimization" to be "going out of your way to improve performance". If you know a faster (better?) way, use it. Sometimes, people seem to confuse YAGNI and premature optimization with just "knowing better".

For your grep example, unless you are using the output of grep for something else, there's no reason not to use the awk version except ignorance (which I'm plenty guilty of re: awk and sed...)
SWAT Teams Deployed in Online 911 Fraud
So I'm looking on ebay for a Symbol XR400 RFID and the lowest price is 1000$. That 250$ price tag is little exaggerated.
Friendly Interface For Archive.org: DeweyMusic.org
Korea to introduce 1 Gbps residential Internet by 2012
Tips for new WordPress users
I think the Hacker News Guidelines provides the best answer to your question:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than
hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be:
anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I commonly use qmv (from renameutils):

qmv, qcp - Rename or copy files quickly, editing the file names in a text editor

Found nothing better for bulk renames because you get to use all the pattern/replace power of your favorite editor instead of learning some wierd specialized grammar through trial & error.

This is how to remove all spaces from mp3 filenames using vim:

qmv -f do *.mp3

:%s/ /_/g

:wq
AOL may be considering Bebo sale -- at a vast discount
Cool, thanks. That's good to know.
Yes, our software is for big screens like plasmas, tv, projectors, digital billboards, etc.

You are right we need pictures. We are getting some great photos from client installations.
Read this together with this story http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462592 about people using VoIP and caller ID spoofing to prank call 911 and dispatch SWAT teams.

Scary stuff. A sophisticated enough criminal could plan to pull a crime, while at the same time DOSing the 911 call center so any legitimate 911 calls would get lost in the noise.
I think these people lacked business sense.

You are not selling coffee, you are selling an experience. Most people go to Starbucks for the experience they have there, the illusion of being refined members of society who can afford it. To feel cool among their peers. The coffee is an admission price. People with a laptop bothering you? How about providing a wi-fi service and charging for it instead?

To distinguish yourself you want to have outrageous quality and markups. You want to target upper middle class people who don't mind spending $10 for a large cup of coffee and a couple of baked goods.

Make your environment as nice as possible. Make the quality of your coffee as good as it can be. Be remarkable. Be well known for having the best coffee in your city, state, or even America. Make people want to drive 20 miles just to get there.

Just opening another unremarkable little coffee shop doesn't make much sense. Opening the "Fat Duck" of coffee shops does.
The Steve Jobs Issue: Do Shareholders Have A Right To Facts About A CEO's Health?
I like the idea of comparing a students score on a standardized test before and after the teacher. And, adding in a long term effect so students from 2+ years down the line also impact your evaluation. IMO, it's going to be hard to teach to this test and next years test without covering the subject in some detail. Also by inspiring students to really enjoy the subject you will improve their long term performance. Basically take 30 students at 50% up to 55%, that's great, and if they keep getting 55 percentile for the next 5 years you probably did a great job.

PS: Students at the edges students will tend to regress to the mean, so you can still measure performance on a class that scored 95% last year.
that will make a very thick wallet. why not just refuse to carry such things? if enough of us say no, they can't force us to use them. I will not carry anything with an RFID chip in it if it can be read from 30 feet away.
Lucy costs $35 USD, plus the cost of the text-to-speech program (e.g. TextAloud, which I think is <$50): http://www.nextup.com/acapela.html

(Acapela doesn't sell directly to consumers; they license their technology to resellers.)
for Emacs users, there is wdired mode, which makes a directory listing editable just like a normal Emacs buffer.
Don't shoot the messenger. I didn't come with the advice, and I realize that it has limitations.

That said, if your family/travel/something else is so important to you that you'll work a job you don't like to make it possible, them perhaps those other things are what you love. Nobody said that you have to define yourself by what you do for a living.
And yet, it is vastly better than Windows actual command line and extremely useful for managing and developing on Windows boxes. I find your claim of it being a bloated piece of crap simply untrue.
Thank you pg. I had recommended giving a karma penalty (-1) for every override, but this works too. It seems others are requesting an "override allowed" setting, which could definitely be useful but as it stands I'm really liking the no override.
we are seeing new antibiotics.

Largely because of the costs of FDA regulation compliance, it costs ~$1-2 billion to develop the average new drug. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmaceutical_industry#The_cos...

How many potential drugs, each year, have not been developed, because of the difference between that cost and the potential cost in a zero-regulation environment? Thousands? Millions?
Actually, we're creating a way for developers to access the web really easily for the purposes of different kinds of analysis, including building semantic frameworks. The idea is that we give you really cheap, really fast access to millions of pages, and you use our platform to analyze Internet content how you want. $2 per 1 million pages crawled, $0.03 per CPU-hour used for any computing you want to do. Not yet at beta, but you can check our site: http://www.80legs.com.
As a caveat, if you are thinking of buying a voice like Lucy, it does not work with Windows' built-in Text-to-speech (for example - Adobe Reader's text-to-speech feature). It looks like Lernout & Hauspie has some kind of agreement with Microsoft to lock out other competitors.
It's a useful reminder of how distinctly unsolved the search problem is. Google has taken stabs at this area from different directions with Google Base and Product Search, but there's still a whole world of information "out there" which is inaccessible or not usefully organized.
Nokia 5130 XpressMusic Unlocked
Nokia 5130 Xpressmusic Designed for ease of use over the completion of complex tasks 5130 does one thing perfectly, downloading and playing music, thus the XpressMusic moniker. One great feature of the phone is the included 3.5mm headset jack.
> I wish more people ranted like this.

Not me. Real rants are more fun to read. cf http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2009/01/river-of-fail.html

Yossi already has what's basically a C++ hater's blog.

I'd like to see these for every popular language and platform.
I think you are missing the point, which is have the simplest version of what you have in mind and build on top of it.
Bailed Out Banks replace workers with lower-paid H1-B workers. Thoughts?
is going to make the internet just blow up.
...
Web application development is made orders of magnitude easier with cloud computing.

Drink kool-aid much?
> There is more to life than what you do to earn a living. There's having a family, traveling, whatever you can imagine.

I think here's the major disagreement between the practical and the idealistic. To the true "amateur" in the original sense, there is no family, traveling, whatever to compete with the ideal or loved interest. Marriages do break-up (or never occur in the first place), people do stay in one place their entire lives, and so on if they love what they do enough. But for people that don't "do what they love," what they DON'T do is what they love, hence the disagreement.
1. Fixed IPs are the exception nowadays in residential connections.

2. That extension goes more against profiling. Not the case of your example.