skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You had to predict that someone was going to offer up a bespoke definition of "sprawl" to defend San Jose, and there you go. Thanks!

First, if you want to define "sprawl" geographically, then the Bay Area and Chicago are almost identical: it's 40.4 miles from the loop to Elgin, and 40.2 miles from the Sunset to Pleasanton. In both cases, that drive is an unbroken parade of suburbs.

Second, the conventional definition of "sprawl" is by population density. Chicago's is 12,500/sq mile; 2.8M people live within the borders of the city. San Francisco is more dense, but has only 800,000 people. No valley city even comes close.

Finally, your anecdote about the drive to Rockford would apply just as well to NYC --- drive 50 miles in any direction from NYC waiting for the suburbs to stop. Apparently NYC is also a sprawl city.

Notice I'm giving you the most favorable possible comparison here, pretending you compared San Francisco to Chicago and not San Jose. Saying "Chicago has much more sprawl than San Jose" is like saying "Chicago has much more sprawl than Oak Brook, IL". San Jose is a suburb with a couple tall buildings, surrounded on all sides by 10-15 miles of flatter suburbs.
I suspect that he forgot to add the speedup option for pb:

option optimize_for = SPEED;
It is illegal to take a photo of a police officer in the UK, isn't it?
From what I understand of Japanese culture, there are few sexual taboos. People are much more open and honest about sex than they are here.

In America, anything beyond missionary position is considered weird. Anal sex is a little edgy. BDSM and roleplaying are considered weird and freaky by pretty much everybody. Which is odd, because sex really should be one of the most individual, unique things for people. Each person has different standards for what they find hot. Why shouldn't that play out during sex?

Those fantasies go far and wide. I'm sure every single person reading this has had bizarre sexual thoughts and ideas. Perhaps not for long, perhaps you've denied the thoughts to yourself as wrong, but the thoughts have crossed your mind. So the concept of a robot like this is, why not let people indulge in these fantasies? Some things you cannot achieve unless you do it virtually. That means either you suppress those fantasies, which is unhealthy, or you find some other outlet - virtual, which is fine, or real, which is certainly not.

My opinion is that having a sexual fantasy about beating and molesting a child is perfectly natural. That's not my personal perverted fantasy, but if it's somebody else's I'm not going to call that strange. So if they've found a way to have that fantasy that doesn't involve harming a child, then props to them! If America had such an open nature to sex, we'd have fewer cultural problems than we do (and we have a lot).
It's Google. Like "www.google.co.uk" is for UK.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ar (and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk )
It's interesting to see the parallels between Amazon's and Google's strategies: they both started as focused web services companies (ecommerce and searching respectively) and both branched into devices to help their services grow. The Kindle is for Amazon is what Android is for Google. I can't wait to see these strategies unfold more.
Though I'm kinda curious if it's possible to "unban" sites on a submission-by-submission basis. Sometimes sites that are generally bad have an interesting article once in a while. Can we "unflag" sites that are auto-banned and let an editor know that maybe they're worth making undead?
What's so revolutionary about it?
I'd never heard of Bluearc before. Anyone else played with Bluearc storage gear?
Yes, some of the recent stuff we've been working on will making skinning much easier.

We now have two themes, the "default", which you see in 280 Slides, and the new "Aristo" theme we announced with Atlas (designed by Sofa: http://www.madebysofa.com/)

Aristo is designed to "feel at home" in Mac OS X and Windows. Does it look too much like OS X for you, or are you talking about the 280 Slides theme?
I thought the same at first, but is Argentina doing something abnormal with .co.ar and .com.ar? According to this: http://www.nic.ar/ google.com.ar IS registered to Google. www.com.ar looks to be an ISP?
Digg - Registration - Digg
"No True Scotsman" fallacy, "the love of money" has a standard meaning quite apart from "the love of traditional capitalist values".
Wired has had embarrassingly low standards for a long time. They go for the "razor-cool, cutting-edge" appearance, which invariably fails because the cutting-edge people don't care about being supercool. That means that while Wired occasionally has a fascinating, relevant article, they more often have lame stories that try too hard.

I don't know if "razor-cool" is a description, since it makes no sense, but it sounds good to me.
I have always found this curious: In general, criminals cause significantly more damage than police. Then where is the outcry against politicians who are soft on crime and thus allow these increased rates of crime?

Thats what I am really worried about. That without good newspapers, politicians who allow an increase in crime through their policies will go unaccountable. (Whether that is already a problem is a matter of much debate).
No, but it's unlikely to exist if filming it means you get beaten up by the police too.
Ann Arbor is actually a great supporting argument to PG's essay. It has the University, walkable neighborhoods, diverse culture, and a complete lack of willing investors. Case in point: Arbor Networks. It moved to Boston at the behest of its investors even though the founders still live in Ann Arbor.

Ever take a Monday morning flight from Detroit to San Francisco? First Class is packed with frequent flyers that have to fly to SV every week. Not only does SV attract startups, it sucks the brain power and experience out of other cities.
Stealthy Memory Injection Attack in Mac OSX
It depresses me sometimes how almost everything in society can be be reduced to the question "but how will this generate money"? On the other hand, maybe the sooner people are honest with reality and start asking that question first, the sooner we'd get solutions to problems like this one. At least that seems to be the libertarian take on things. It just concerns me that the end result of the invisible hand given absolute power is something out of a William Gibson nightmare.
Redditors getting outraged because of a video showing police brutality is great. But it doesn't scale to cover things like fact-checking the police, like the article is talking about. If there isn't a shocking video, TV news and Reddit won't really care.

Consider the article's example of Baltimore. How often is there a reddit, 4chan, or youtube outrage relating to Baltimore? Whereas the Baltimore Sun can have crime reporters there every day.
This video consists of snippets from previous "Microsoft future vision" videos. Full videos here: http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/b112da1c-c918-4...

The healthcare video is the one that seems to get the most attention. (When I first saw it, everyone around me was "ooh"ing and "aah"ing.) I actually found the video to be a pretty banal vision of the future of healthcare. You don't fix healthcare by adding a bunch of touch screens everywhere. What would have impressed me is if any of the following had been featured:

- AI decision support helps the doctor correctly diagnose a patient's disease (think 20q.net, but for medicine)

- Software that helps nurses in the ER triage patients and queues them to be seen based on a mathematical model to minimize costs and morbidity

- Enterprise resource management that ensures all resources are delivered around the hospital like clockwork

- Telepresence software that lets a surgeon in China watch and maybe even guide the surgery

- An app that gives patients specific recommendations based on their genotype and lets them communicate with others who have similar genes (see http://www.patientslikeme.com/)

These things would not have made great eye candy, but they are far more important to the future of healthcare.
http://baltimorecrime.blogspot.com/
The reason we got all this great investigative reporting in the first place was because newspapers were making money.

Journalism needs to have its own source of power besides the government. You can't simultaneously depend on the government for funding and make it your mission to expose the government's shortfalls. Profit provides that power.
"abusing its monopoly position by overcharging corporations for access to consumers"

I guess I don't understand the problem here. If you advertise with Google you aren't barred from advertising elsewhere. This is like saying the Superbowl is abusing its popularity by charging high prices for ads. There are plenty of other places to buy advertising on the internet.
A. I still don't think twitter is genius and I'm only 34, so I don't feel that I'm just too old.

> I pulled out my phone to tweet about something interesting that just happened.

B. Why? I don't understand the personality type who finds publicly announcing their every little thought as something attractive.

Kids these days seem to think all this social connection is such a great thing but from what I see they're all broken and can't do anything alone without first bouncing the idea of 10 friends for social approval. Has there ever been a more insecure generation? Truly giving meaning to the word "sheeple".

Kids these days have virtually no focus and don't appear to think deeply about anything because they're so continually distracted by texting, cell phones, twittering, that they can't sit still for 2 hours to watch a film and actually pay attention enough to enjoy it. I take my 15 year old daughter to a movie, of her choosing, and I want to smash her phone into the ground and strap her head to the back of chair just to make her pay attention to the damed movie that she picked and is making me watch.
MSN Tech & Gadgets - Products - Results from MSN Shopping
Note that the quote isn't "the love of money is evil", but that it is "the root of all evil". A small but important distinction.
Why is more government always the only answer to solving a problem?
Looking at all the other attempts to create a Silicon Valley that have pretty much failed and they were all government sponsored. It seems obvious that government can't solve that problem either.
With all the social networking capability now it should be easier to find other hackers, founders, and angels in any city of sufficient size.
We need a facebook for founders to bring all of this together. Though getting the funders to notice might be an issue.
The quote from Timothy 6:10 is actually something like "ριζα γαρ παντων των κακων εστιν η φιλαργυρια ης τινες ορεγομενοι απεπλανηθησαν απο της πιστεως και εαυτους περιεπειραν οδυναις πολλαις", if you're going to get technical.

The New American Standard Bible renders the relevant piece of that quote as "For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil".

In context (http://nasb.scripturetext.com/1_timothy/6.htm), it is clearly being shown as dangerous because it can distract you from God, and in the full context of Jesus' similar quote it is even more explicit that way (http://nasb.scripturetext.com/luke/16.htm).

Please note this is by way of information. If a thing is to be damned or praised, let it be damned or praised for what it truly is, not for what is left after a three-level Telephone game. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_game)
While I agree that it is reasonable to be skeptical of an article defending Apple from Apple Insider, a good comment would include criticism of the article itself rather than your strictly ad hom attack.
That's such a predictable future it makes me suspicious.

Newspapers? Devices that need a stylus to use the screen? No keyboards? Nothing wearable, no summary dashboards?

It looks a lot like a read-only, use-only, no-hacking, Trusted DRM Limited swirly interface kind of future to me.
I read _AS_ when I was 18 and I've thought about this quotation a lot through the last 20 months, as Reddit frothed about Ron Paul, Gold Standard, Banking collapse, etc.

As I've thought more and more about it, something seems off about Francisco's speech, namely: Money is _no longer_ the representation of value in green paper; no, it is the representation of transferrable obligation, i.e. debt.

http://bit.ly/14idwP

Rand's philosophical position, expressed through D'Anconia, is that money is an expression of _value_, created by a man through his labor and that through its exchange, a rational process, a rational means for motivating and directing men's labor exists, "their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun."

I don't think this works quite as cleanly if you start consider that you're selling tokens of servitude, or indebtedness.
....why are you submitting this?
True, but is it better for a paper to be afraid of its sponsors and popular opinion than to be afraid of the government? The need to appeal to the lowest common denominator to maximize profit is what's brought us such gems like USAToday and 99% of the garbage on television. On the other hand, some of the only watchable programming IMO is on PBS, and we know where that money comes from.

I don't have the answer; papers funded by the government would be a disaster like you said. But I don't think profit is the panacea to the world's problems.
This is fantastic, except Canadian authors/publishers are left out once again. I'm amazed by how many times Canadian customers' money is left on the table.
I have. If you need a really high performance NAS it's a reasonable choice. Better price:performance than NetApp, but still not priced as low as it should be IMHO.

FPGA powered: http://www.spec.org/sfs97r1/results/sfs97r1.html
It sounds like my ignorance of EC2 led me to believe that your service was simpler than it really is. I meant no offense.
Wow. Are people impressed by that article because of the sonorous prose? Because the content definitely isn't impressive.

Rand's first mistake is not realizing that the love of money quote speaks to individuals and not to societies. An individual who loves the material world more than the spiritual world (not god necessarily, maybe just the world inside his own head), is pitiable.

The saddest thing I've ever heard was from a friend who told me that his main goal in life was making money -- he wanted that more than anything. I asked him if I wanted the money for anything in particular, and he couldn't answer me.
"[T]he love of traditional capitalist values"! The meaning of money, which she explained, is the same quite apart from your "traditional capitalist values" -- didn't want to let that rhetorical slap zip by unchallenged.

If you can understand the meaning of money and claim that love of money, which embodies that meaning, is the root of all evil, fine. But then, you might as well say that love of ANYTHING that's good is the root of all evil. In the same way that this maxim exaggerates its claim, I can plausibly argue that love of sex with women is the root of all evil, because men commit most evil and, one way or another, most of it has its roots in pursuing women.
Microsoft Office Labs vision 2019
Yes.

First, App Engine will really only run things that are written for App Engine. If you have a Python web application, there's a good likelihood that it won't run on App Engine because it does things that App Engine doesn't (like relational database stuff or cron jobs or whatnot). Enterprise applications are things already written.

Second, enterprise applications are usually things that don't need to support millions of users so much as they need to have features. You're not serving like Digg or Google so much as doing non-real-time data processing. So, App Engine's infiniscale thing isn't as important as a relational database's ability to have triggers.

Third, App Engine doesn't have an SLA. That's a harsh sell for enterprise stuff. It doesn't even have a way to make a backup of the database in a dump file. That makes it an absolute no-go.

Fourth, App Engine's low cost usually isn't a concern on the enterprise level (even if it should be).

App Engine is a cool service, but whether it will become important is yet to be seen. If you're running a small site (say, 1,000,000 pageviews per month), you aren't going to have trouble scaling a MySQL/PostgreSQL database and application. You'll normally be showing one pageview per second at that rate. So, it's just as easy to go with Slicehost or Amazon. And using Amazon or Slicehost or the like has advantages - you get to use any software you find useful, you can have relational databases, etc. So, for small sites, App Engine's scaling capabilities aren't so important.

For larger sites, you just can't deal without a backup strategy, SLA, and cron jobs. It's too limiting. Plus, when you're a big site, you can hire people to deal with scaling issues.

So, it misses a little on both sides. I really want to love it, but there are just some gaps in the offering that are really important. I don't think Google needs to worry about the low side since they can't practically offer things like JOINs off their architecture, but on the high side, they need to offer data dumps and cron jobs and a little more information about the data integrity in the system (how many copies, how fast is it replicated, etc.)
Yes and no; the BBC is perceived as independent even while publicly funded; so are NPR and PBS, to a much lesser extent.
[Video] of Pizza Box turning into Plates and Storage Unit
Book: After the Software Wars
Given the technology that's already available, we should have cars that drive us around, in absolute safety, while we lounge in the back and sip champagne. This book explains how we can build better software and all get our own high-tech chauffeur.
In fact, I sense a business opportunity in providing a service that creates ads on all of the major search engines for the same effort required to place them on only one.
I pretty sure Paul would agree that love of sex with women is a root of much evil (not to mention love of sex with men which is even worse!).
Well, there is plenty of friction in the world of telecoms, and its tangent with media - .tel solves many of these problems.

Check out the DEMOfall 08 presentation for a brief 5 minute overview, or their in-house "Tell The World" interview for a lengthier discussion:

http://www.telnic.org/media-resources.html

The best blog writeup I found is here:

http://www.disruptivetelephony.com/2008/12/is-the-new-tel-do...

If you want to get into a discussion then let me know and I'll pitch some thoughts at you, but wanted to introduce you to the subject first, in case you hadn't already looked into it.
Well that's just it, I don't know anymore than that. I don't know who to believe on this story.
They're right too- AOE and AOK were very playable on a dialup connection.

It's interesting to me that they wound up doing the synchronized message processing model, and that its brittleness became a strength in the war against cheaters. It makes sense, but it's not something I would have anticipated.
Details somewhat less exciting than headline:

"The main weakness of his attack is that it relies on an unspecified means of executing arbitrary code on the computer in the first place: according to Iozzo’s presentation (PDF), an attacker must have knowledge of remote code execution “in his pocket” in order to convince his mark’s computer run a bootstrapper that initiates the attack."
So, if you already have a remote execution bug in OS X, you can execute code in other processes to hide yourself. This wasn't new when Back Orifice did it in the '90s. I'm also not sure why he's bothering mucking with Mach-O files, when you can just use the Mach task APIs to do the same thing directly.
The problem that I have with mt is that they sell themselves as the "don't worry, put your site with us and nothing can go wrong" company. And that can never be true. No one can make promises like that, but those promises mean that they don't tell you things like backup strategies, replication, data centers, etc. And so you're just left with a promise that they've taken care of everything.

While I don't expect a company to tell me everything, I much prefer Amazon's take on the issue. For example, they specifically quote an annual failure rate that they expect and offer S3 snapshots (which are replicated across multiple boxes in multiple locations) as a backup. No hype or promises; just the knowledge I need to make sure I don't loose data.

With companies like Slicehost, Linode, or Amazon I know what I'm getting: a Xen instance with a certain amount of RAM. I can then replicate data, take backups, etc. to make sure that my site stays up and running. With Media Temple, I just get the promise of "hundreds of servers working in tandem to power [my] websites". Clearly it isn't 500 servers just working on my site or anything like that. So, what is it? It's a mystery and I find that when companies try to be mysterious, it's not because they're giving you more; it's because they're giving you less.
Atlas Shrugged is my favorite book! I am very pleased to see it being quoted here.
Note that the heroes of Atlas Shrugged all voluntarily give up their monetary fortunes. The book's central theme is the reason that would cause them to do that.
How is it "abnormal" to keep the same hierarchy as the main hierarchy? The countries that mix everything like .es tend to lose some vital functionality.

Also with all its deficiencies, the Argentinean NIC is free, as in free beer.
For the short term, Erwin's "let's not make this reddit" is right. However, editor-oversight of this list and, more broadly, this site has drawbacks: sustainability, non-diversity, missed opportunity.

There are many news stories that are absolute tripe by our standards and yet yield good discussions, distinctions, related works, and counterpoints. There is an insightful response to even the worst tripe. It might be a detailed criticism for the author or submitter, an explanation of phenomenon, or a link to a better blog-post on the same issue. The problem isnt that our ethic is absent there, but that it's drowned out.

Build up a public system alongside editor intervention. Technical implementation or culture may be the things that make websites deteriorate, and we can change these. Try things out, and if they seem to work, let them take over to a greater extent.

Some ideas:
* Deter 'rabble' from participating:
* Make the site have a higher usability learning curve
* Make the community extremely hostile to even potential stupidity.
* Increase the 'cost' of upmodding:
* Add a time-delayed reconfirmation for upmods
* Limit upmods per day.
* Pick up possible problems in a post or reply and ask for confirmation: "Here is a preview of your comment, possible bad grammer highlighted blue. We discourage 'memes', aolbonics, and old jokes; these are highlighted red. If these are false positives, please hit submit and a developer will address these issues."
* Put "please upmod and post insightful and well-composed comments that expand on or offer alternative views to the story" directly under the 'add comment' button.
* Add a 'criticize' field to stories and comments that would be visible or sent to the author, with "this is vague", "this could be shorter", "provide evidence", "the title is sensationalist", etc.
* Add a mandatory preview button for posts and comments.
We just transitioned a customer off of MT onto some cheap dedicated servers with Amazon S3 storage and not only did their hosting costs go down, the performance went up dramatically.

In the business parlance of today, my stakeholder expectations were not aligned with their soup to nuts value proposition.