skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Currencies do not need to be backed by anything. They are simply intermediary goods, valuable because of a coordination game. There is no "collecting in mass". The dollar is the final good. The U.S. has no debts outstanding in anything other than dollars ( which is quite a nice situation to be in).
Advice: how to convert SQL data?
I need some advice/a clever idea. Basically, I have a legacy SQL database that I inherited from our client's old development shop and I need to move all the data over to our new database.

The two schemas are vastly different - the old one is a MYISAM based system with no FKs and is missing some serious integrity.

My question is - is there some easy way to massage the old data into our new schema?

What I've been working on now is basically to build PHP objects for their old data and then write something to generate SQL statements for our new schema. Since we are using Symfony for the new project, I might also try and hook into Symfony and let it figure out the SQL. This will probably work but its really slow and tedious.
Just because ChaCha got funding, doesn't necessarily make it a good idea.

I've never used it before, so I decided to give both it, Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Ask.com the same search phrase in response to this comment and see what the results are.

What is the speed of light? - I felt a simple enough question.

Google took just 0.11 seconds to give me an exact answer.
Yahoo took 0.28 seconds
Live Search has no timer, but it was much less than 1 second, I assume around the same speed as Yahoo
Ask.com no timer, but same perceived speed as both Yahoo and Live Search

Finally, I tried asking the question to ChaCha, I asked it around 4:16pm, it asked me to sign up, so I did, went through the signup process, confirmed my email address - now its sending me through an SMS to confirm my mobile..

EDIT - it's now 4:25pm, still no SMS on my mobile phone from ChaCha.. I think its fair to say that comparing 10 minutes to 0.11 seconds is a pretty clear indicator why human search isn't a good idea.

Even if you take out the signup stage, human reaction time can't even compete with 0.11 seconds and that doesn't begin to factor in things like time it takes to read the question.

EDIT #2 - 5:06pm, still no SMS...
FANTASTIC!!!
AWESOME!!
GREAT!
Or maybe they (the folks at Apple working on this problem) don't want to run into MobileMe v2.0 and are taking their time to make sure it's (push) is done properly instead of having a mob of 10 million+ people pissed off at them. You know, just maybe.
Good point. It would be pretty hard to imagine a popular line of jokes based around images of things succeeding.

But that's just an unusually pure case of a general rule, I think. Maybe I'm unwittingly biased but almost all the jokes I hear are some kind of inventive invitation to laugh at someone else's expense. That just seems to be a general rule of comedy, and comedy is an extremely powerful force behind troll-like behaviour.

Bad Things Happening To Other People (Especially Celebrities) is just such a potent force for entertainment across all categories that I think we can just assume it's here to stay and try to design either for or around it.
Well, in what stage is your app at? How many users do you have to support? What's the app serving... lots of images or mostly text out of database? How much RAM is your app using with mongrels (check it with top)? What's your hardware setup like? If you're on slices, are they 32bit or 64bit and how much RAM do you have?

Passenger's great if you have a lot of RAM (say over 1gb). If you're on 256/512Mb slices, I'd stick with nginx+mongrel (or thins) since that combo will utilize less RAM and won't swap.

Finally, you should test and see for yourself how the app performs when you load it with httperf or something like that.
But we do create more of it (or dig it out of the ground and refine it, as it were), there's simply a practically finite rate at which we can grow the gold supply.

So the value of gold should in fact deflate over time, as we produce more and more of it.
I just tried that with Reader. I have no unread items but gears wanted to download 2000 items and it took a while.

Then, I switched back to online mode, works as you expect.

Switched back to offline mode, and it wants to download 2000 items again.

I decided offline mode for reader wasn't very good.
Larry Smith is amazing guy, he is a legend in UW.
Although he is an economist, he is particularly fond of computer science nerds :) and encourages them to be bold and creative.
See one of his lectures called "Creating Killer Applications"
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/Larry%20Smith:%20Creating%2...
Reflection on crisis: Daniel Kahneman and Nassim Taleb at DLD conference [video]
"So, I did a little research on the size of the market: "

Generally speaking, how does one go about researching the size of some arbitrary market?
The problem with that logic is, if you don't work and have to rely on someone else to feed you, that means I have to work twice as hard to feed my family and now feed you.

There's something wrong when 30% (soon to be 50%) of the population doesn't pay taxes, and expects the rest of us to provide for them, IMHO.
In my world, goods and services I purchase are the final goods, not the money I need to purchase them.

About "collecting en masse", I guess time will tell. You might be right, for those holding large amounts of dollars (China for example) a "run on the US government" would be a bad thing, they're better off unloading their less valuable currency gradually and exchanging them for something with intrinsic value such as gold and silver. And in the mean time, the dollar will keep on loosing it's value.
The most significant line from the article for me: "The World Health Organization estimates that approximately 536 million people worldwide are infected with herpes..."

That's really an astonishing number. From a utilitarian standpoint this finding must be incredibly important.
For what it's worth, the origin of "griefing" is not found in the value (or lack thereof) of a person's conference talks.

If that were the case, then just about every conference speaker would get "griefed" this way, because speakers are uniformly unprepared, unrehearsed, completely unaware of the separation of "What I want to say" and "what my audience wants to hear," incapable of making it 3 sentences without stuttering, couldn't design a legible slide to save their hides, and leave the audience wondering where the hell their 45 minutes have gone.

It is arrogance, it is disrespect, and it is absolutely fucking unprofessional. It's also universal.

No, it comes from a feeling of insecurity.

You get somebody towards whom "everyone" feels warmly disposed (like Kathy), and the people on the fringes -- who feel their own brilliance is being ignored -- hate this interloper, who adds no value, who isn't even one of us for fuck's sake! And people like him/her! Act as if they are god's gift to whatever!

Out comes the viciousness.

I've experienced this myself.

I've never received death threats, but I did have my own personal troll, who'd come into the framework IRC channel and flood it with nasty, nasty things, making it impossible for me or anyone else to hold a conversation, and photoshop my pictures in rude ways.

I know who did it -- prominent people.

These were smart, smart guys. They had a lot going for them. But in their eyes, it was a valuable use of their time to harrass a 20yo girl who wrote some tutorials that people loved.

You have to question the ultimate utility of a person who'd rather harrass some person who's off doing his/her own thing, rather than creating more great shit.

Now me, I am nothing if not ballsy. I know who these people are, but I never bothered to tell them I knew. Now they both treat me with respect, even like me and use my ideas for their stuff. All the while, I quietly prove that I am the better man.

But I do not think that being ballsy makes me a better person than someone who is not ballsy.
Lessons From A Philanthropic Startup
Granted people buy deflationary items. Consumer electronics, stock options, and perhaps one or two other things. That fact is proving that deflationary spirals are not something to be concerned about?

I'm only responding at all, because I have a cool analogy that I want to use.

Positive feedback. If you're not aware of what that is, since this is a digitally oriented site, it's not a good thing. It means that the more something happens, the more something happens. The less something happens, the less something happens.

Economies tend to have this quality because of people's emotions. There's also negative feedback, which is capitalism, where supply and demand form a beautiful analog computer that is almost magical in it's ability to allow goods to appear where they're needed most, when they're needed most. But, on top of this wonderful capitalist negative feedback system, we have the evil positive feedback system of human greed and fear.

With positive feedback caused by our greed and fear, in this case, fear, we end up in a deflationary spiral, where everything just shuts down, and the more it shuts down, the more people lose their jobs, and the more they hoard money and goods, and things shut down even tighter.

This is not an especially difficult or non-intuitive point, and I only make it, since you didn't seem to grasp it, and I wanted to talk about feedback.

Now, it's very nice to talk about savings. I quit my job two years ago to spend time on my start-up, and I could do it because I was a good saver. That said, what is good for a person, is not good for a people. A society that hoards, will soon be hoarding crumbs and dirt.
Basically the key point of his article was that expertise should be viewed in terms of measurable goals and objectives. Research now agrees with that view. Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, one of the world's leading researchers on expertise has done some interesting research on this.http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti... The pdf mentions some research that showed that plateaus in learning Morse code were not intrinsic to learning but were dependent on the training methods used to learn

Research does show that it matters whether you choose to focus on one specific subset of the activity, or whether you just practice the activity. Deliberate practice requires that you work with the specific goal of improving a specific weakness. The fact that benefit from practice starts to decline after two hours demonstrates the amount of effort required in deliberate practice.
I would advise that unless you have a very good reason to not use it, you should go with Passenger. It's way simpler to set up, less moving parts, and you don't have to worry about monitoring mongrel, configuring proxies, and all that junk.

You can always change later if you discover it's not working for you, but until then go with the simplest solution that works, which is definitely Apache/Passenger.

And yes, I do use a staging server, or rather a staging directory which is hooked into a "beta" url. It's an invaluable final sanity check in the production environment. That is not hard - the tricky thing will be staging on something resembling the production database, you'll have to figure out some way of doing that.

Ironically, the staging environment is probably where you'll want to use mongrel, since you'll want to start the app with a different rails environment to point to your staging DB.
I'm probably missing something. If the dollar is worthless because it isn't backed by real goods, why are gold and silver valuable? Just because of common consent, i.e. most throughout history have considered gold and silver to be exchangeable for goods? If that's your reasoning, then the same applies to the dollar, except on a lesser scale.
DJ & Pole Dancing Robots by Giles Walker [video]
See also artist's site:

http://www.gileswalker.org/gileswalker.org/ROBOTS/Pages/pole...
Not nearly enough info for anyone to help you with, and not interesting enough for the crowd here to likely care about. You should probably seek paid help from someone with experience.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363855
No, we don't. No matter how you look at this, gold is not "created". Cold is extracted from gold mines, the only thing humans can do it try to find, but they simply can not create it.

Key here is that the total amount of gold on this planet is finite - not the production or extraction rate - making it truly valuable. Same thing applies to other natural resources such as oil, natural gas and diamonds.
The best case I've seen was at a certain SAT center. A group of 5 people went together with the idea to copy off each other. However, the proctor had each one draw a number from a hat to determine where he was going to sit. Since they ended up sitting in different parts of the room, the plan was thwarted.

A few minutes later, the proctor realized she had messed up the seating. People were supposed to seat on every other row, but there were two rows one right after the other. She said "Why don't you move around a bit?" at which point everyone got up and the 5 people in the group sat together.

All of them had a 790.
That is neat, how does your friend foresee free electricity coming about? Something specific like "alternative energies," fusion, etc.? Or just the general trend of people trying to develop and diversify sources of energy?
Big organizations don't trust individuals enough to make them the single point of failure for encryption. Most often, these organizations run key servers that have the actual key, and provide the key based on some form of auth (usually Active Directory). If the user forgets their AD password, its an easy reset; and if they leave the company or something, their data is easily recoverable.

This sort of "encryption in the sky" approach is available to consumers too. There are products by most of the big encryption vendors (like http://voltage.com/vsn/) that make it easy for a user to encrypt their data without putting themselves at risk for data loss.
For a moment I actually found myself believing the interview. I could relate and identify with.
Well, quite. Tell that to Gordon Brown who flogged off the UK's gold reserves at 1/3 of the current price (he even announced weeks in advance that he was planning to dump a load of gold on the market which further drove down the price).
That is not a good model either. Sure, you get a lot of problems solved, but they are all very immediate and pragmatic. Plus, America would have been defeated by China, USSR, Nazi Germany, etc. if this were true.

The best way is to decouple science from politics as much as possible.
That's not true tho'; it's resistance to corrosion makes gold industrially valuable.

Currencies should be backed by something pretty fundamental. Eventually it has to be the Joule.
Common consent doesn't have much to do with the real value of precious metals.

The reason why gold and silver are "valuable" and the dollar is not, lies in the fact that gold and silver can not be created "out of thin air". This was exactly the reason why, in better days, currency was backed by gold or silver, thus transferring the intrinsic value of precious metals onto the currency.
Ask HN: Best approaches for Javascript game graphics?
I'm wondering what the most viable approaches are for 2d (or 3d) graphics in straight browser Javascript?.

Canvas, SVG? Are there other straightforward approaches that offer primitive graphics operations like drawing lines, circles, pixels? Experiences and thoughts on this much appreciated.

(I recently wrote a dinky little javascript game [plug]messynotebook.com/?p=71[/plug]. Straight CSS+DOM worked for me in that case, but I'm looking into better ways of doing it next time.)
It's not like we would be likely to find you among the other 10,000 Paul Browns of course!
That number was a surprise on the low side for me, because I've often heard estimates that 25%-30% of adults in the US have HSV-2. Naively scaling that up to worldwide would have suggested up to 2 billion infections.
Instead of tying a person to a handle, explicitly, each person should be restricted to a single handle in a community. If they misbehave in that community, the handle is punished. But, the person's actual identity is not affected.

Of course, restricting the number of handles per person is pretty difficult without some kind of record of their real identity. But, there's a puzzle to solve!
Re: Two types of programmers

I totally agree that people are generally more on one side of that spectrum or the other. That said, the problem with way too many organizations and methodologies is that they don't take into account that it's not a static thing -- i.e., to be productive as a team requires a balance of both. Periods where there's little to no interruptions and periods of high-interactions.

Alas, one very key facet is that the majority of managers tend towards the extreme of the interrupter end of the spectrum.

As a segue, I've always found it interesting that a lot of the best CEO's actually get up really early in the morning so that they can get a few hours of "real" work done before jumping into the over-scheduled, interrupting rest of the day.

Re: Full days work

This is another area where the Taylor-istic mindset has completely corrupted notions of "work".

Reminds me of the study of taxi drivers. A lot of them worked backwards from what they wanted/needed to make each month to come up with the number that they needed to make day. Then, they'd usually work until they hit that number and then go home. But, that completely misses the burstiness of the business -- some days you're in the zone and cranking while other days it's a waste because things are dead. They could make more money by working long days when the pickings are good.
That basically describes my school's math department. The classes are small, usually around 20-25 once you finish calc1. The only calculators they allow in test are the cheap 10 function ones, and the professor will actually bring them into the class the day of the test.

Also, it seems like most of my technical classes put most emphasis on the tests. Tests are usually worth 50% to 80% of the final grade. So while I don't usually see blatant cheating, it seems like the engineering department has acknowledged that some students will end up just copying problem solutions, and responded by basing most of your grade on tests.
Better question: why would anyone use a "harder" language, all else being equal?
It isn't a celebrities job to listen to feedback from the public, so they are safe to ignore it and actively fight it as much as they want. It is the job of someone like Arrington to wade through the morass of hatefilled comments, while putting on an approachable as possible front, though. Can you see the impact is different in either case?
Water-Powered Jet Pack
Don't know what it might be good for but it sure looks like fun.
I've seen several 'hard' engineers (physicists with Matlab experience) learn C++ in a couple of weeks. It's doable but... as you might expect, the code they pump out is terrible. There's a huge difference between doing basic C++ and being productive and efficient in it.
But the people who devote themselves more to communication and promotion than engineering seem to have a disproportionate leg up.
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Yeah, that is really unfortunate. We care more about shock than aesthetics. It'd be nice to figure out how to combine the two in a way where beauty fixes the ugly.
Nginx in front of a pack of Mongrels works fine for me. It is _VERY_ memory efficient, which is a nice property to have if you want to have a production Rails app running on a 256 MB VPS.

Staging server: I don't use one currently, as it is overkill for the complexity of the application I have, but will probably start using one during my next project.
So you're saying universal quantifiers are never correct?
Arguing From First Principles
I picked that up after I spent some time in China, where it's a common enough thing that nobody thinks twice when you do it. But back in the US, it gets a lot of strange looks.
I regard eliminating STD's and developing 100% idiot proof contraceptives as quite important. Ideally this would lead to humanity getting over the whole sex thing once and for all and it can be relegated to stuff no one cares about like whether you like mustard or ketchup.
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You are obviously new to this whole world domination thing. Might want to look in the mirror. ;)
I don't think programming has given me any "real life bad habbits."

I get the feeling that a lot of the things people have listed are things they do because they like the idea of them, and actually do on purpose rather than habit.
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You mention they are smart people. Do you mean there is a utilitarian motive to griefing, at least in the large scale cases? Effective trolling seems to efficiently polarize issues. When something is polarized it becomes much more discrete and easier to manage. That's why partisan politics do better than third options or bipartisanship.
I don't see why police couldn't do anything

You must be new here...
That's true, but probably only for a very small group (HN readers and the like)
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I work at a place where we develop microscopes (fairly powerful, laser-based microscopes). It's complicated to get the autorizations to bring biological tissues (that's our official, grant-application name for supermarket meat) into the uni lab, so most researchers just trust the calculations and image their own fingers.

My research director always uses the same finger, although it's a bit of a superstition...
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PopCap Games’ retail revenues up 85 percent in 2008 as PC game sales dive
There goes the HN spam filter.
What "issue" do you think they could be "polarizing", given my description above?
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While I don't agree with all his opinions, it is definitely not off topic. Plus, he should not be downvoted because he thinks casual sex is emotionally destructive. That, in fact, ties into his broader point. He thinks Obama will ease the polarization that leads to so many vehement disagreements, which he thinks bleed over to the online world. This goes hand in hand with the other poster's highly upvoted comment about PCness breeding repressed anger that is expressed online, of which the downvoting due to offense is a symptom.
Just using OS X would be a good option for you.

If you check out Sharing in the preferences menu you will see you can set it up to allow ftp connections and from within your own network, easy as that!

Hope you have a good connection over there! ;)
PC and passive aggressiveness build on each other. PC builds pent up aggression, which people take out on others who are open and not PC. Now you have another emotionally repressed PC person looking for a target to release on.
At a certain point, free choice is unmaintainable. People obviously have to be self controlled in their personal lives. Since our personal lives affect each other, the need for self control must extend to the society as well.
Hooray for genetic hacking. I really hope they can use similar methods to wipe out cancer cells as well - thought, cancer isn't a virus and there are lots of different cancer cells.
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I think you're overgeneralizing, especially 100 various things can be understood under the term "meditation". There is a program for mindfulness-based stress reduction using meditation as one of the elements, with scientifically proven effects: http://www.mindfullivingprograms.com/whatMBSR.php

Addressing the original question, this is an exceptional introduction:
http://www.amazon.com/Miracle-Mindfulness-Thich-Nhat-Hanh/dp...