skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"but absolute truth shall ever elude humans in this complex world."

Why?

Do you think a grand unified field theory is impossible? Do you think that quantum mechanics is the final word in physics? Do you suppose that that truth is knowable to some hypothetical race of aliens? (You specifically say that humans can't attain any absolute truth.) Or do you simply think that some truths are unknowable, such as distant historical events?

Do you hold any superstitions (religious or otherwise)? (You probably don't, but it helps to cover all the bases.)
It gets worse for those affected: http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/2009/03/01/cluster-2-im...

Sounds like there's gonna be some financial compensation according to some messages from MT on Twitter to customers voicing their disapproval at the now 24+ hours downtime.
Meltdowns: CEO's $500,000 Salary Burns Startup Into Fire Sale
How six companies have flourished during the recession.
She did veer a bit too much into philosophy after Atlas Shrugged, but I think she was pretty clear her writing should be taken as a romanticized work of fiction. I think she went as far as she did assuming the reader understands this, and trying to take things literally is a bit foolish.
Granted, having been told she is right so many times she may have believed it later, but I remember the edition I read had pretty much a disclaimer in this sense somewhere.
I agree. At 11, I would be concerned if my child WASN'T swearing! It's now normal for an 11 year old to be using the word "FUCK" alot, so I would wonder about one who wasn't saying that on a regular basis instead of worrying about it if he/she was. Let kids cuss! They qare going to eventually anyway.
Could we stop believing in free will already?
You went from "I have not heard of a case ..." to mentioning a few cases. I took your first comment at face value; now I don't know what to make of it.
Because the world is complicated :) Thankfully. And by the time we get to understand significantly more then we do (not even close to everything) we won't be humans anymore. And this whole point will probably be obsolete.
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.

Really? I guess living in or near large cities all these years has warped my perspective of what "in America" means. None of these things seems particularly weird or taboo amongst my social set.

If America had such an open nature to sex, we'd have fewer cultural problems than we do (and we have a lot).

And Japan doesn't have problems? I think you're giving the culture a huge pass. If you wanted to hold up the Netherlands as an example of a very healthy and very open sexual culture (including a societal understanding that teenagers have an interest in sex, and will have sex), then I'd be on board with you. But, we're talking about Japan here...The land of "Christmas cake", "kawaii", etc. Infantilization of women is the norm. That's not healthy or merely open...that's just broken in a different direction than America's protestant zeal.

I wasn't trying to suggest that America has a healthy approach to sex. We, on the whole, don't, particularly with regard to teenagers and sex (some of our child protection laws are bizarre and have horrific consequences, like labeling a 17 year old that has sex with a consenting 15 year old as a sexual predator and a child abuser). But I said nothing about America in my comments. This wasn't a "Go USA! Japan sucks!" conversation, and I don't think there's really anything interesting about such a conversation.

Again, I'm not suggesting it should be illegal...just that I'm rather stunned that the market for a "molest a child" game is large enough such that that is how they market this product. It is, to me, a disturbing indicator of the way a reasonably large segment of Japanese men feel about women (large enough to be the market they've chosen to target with this really clever new toy).
Yup, Quake Live comparison is not fair.

If you use custom plugins, you should be compared to desktop games. Plugins run regular compiled C++ (or whatever) code, browser just gives them a place where they can draw. And from Quake Live FAQ it seems they even use DirectX, so it's actually hardware accelerated.
Most people here value the material world more then the spiritual world ... between discussing spirituality and creating something, I'd say most would choose creating.

The urge to create things is very spiritual for me, just fwiw. It doesn't have to be material things either - these days it's mostly software and occasionally robots, and in the past it's been mathematics and music. But I must create things - it's a fundamental part of the person I am.
Why Location-Awareness Services Are Becoming More Important
Information Technology, 50 Years Ago
I think the schema is causing this. Lists of strings of nonfixed size aren't going to yield good results, as any serialization framework now has to perform work to find the delimeters of each string. In this case you could store IP addrs and all the other DNS fields as ints and you should see a massive speedup. This would probably be closer to the actual workload google or fb sees - why would they be serializing huge records of data that's already been encoded into a human-readable / string format?
Ok, so your answer to my question would be: it is better to design for graceful degradation (progressive enhancement), because one keeps more options open for the future, rather than buying into one complex framework.

Thanks -- I don't necessarily agree, but it is a good answer and a valid point of view.
The only problem I see with this kind of thing is it uses the same CPU as flash (FF3.1b3 and Safari4b1), and Flash is pretty slow on OSX anyway!
Physics is the crown jewel of human knowledge. But even there, the theories of Physics are mere approximations to the actual phenomena that occur in the world. If you are familiar with Physics, then you know how almost-correct theories have been discarded for even more almost-correct theories throughout history.

If our knowledge of as objective a field as Physics is so uncertain, then it makes sense that the state of knowledge in a much more nuanced field like Ethics is near hopeless.

I suspect aliens would run into the same problems as we do, even if they were much smarter than us. I suspect perfect knowledge is unattainable.

Lastly,

>"Do you hold any superstitions (religious or otherwise)? (You probably don't, but it helps to cover all the bases.)"

I don't think the religious would appreciate your reference to their beliefs as "superstition". And no, I am not religious.

However, I don't appreciate your last parenthetical, which implies that I would be offended if you assumed that I was religious. Just yesterday I discovered among Donald Knuth's publications an illustrated book of Bible versus. I have thick enough skin to be lumped among simpletons like Donald Knuth.
Actually according to the article they HOPE that it will mutate to death...
Sure, the world is complicated. But how does that make an "absolutist" moral system impossible?

I think that with regard to morality (as it applies to humans, on earth), absolute truths and rules are not only possible to know (and make), but necessary. Without this, human actions are no longer guided by reason, and that is a very bad situation.
I wish that were me. I try to create because I admire creators. However, the drive to create is not innate to my personality. Rather, it is a struggle.

Fortunately, I am learning to hack my personality to drive myself to do what I want. For example, I surround myself with creative people and I work on team projects where a sense of duty will drive me to do good work. But it is hard, and I must trick myself to do what I desire.
We are on Hacker News, aren't we? ... [skipped] ... As for making money, this is how our success is measured.

No it is not. I love HN, but most people here accept the distorted definition of a hacker.

Hacker culture had nothing to do with money, only lately, and PG is partially guilty of this, "hacker" started to associate with "21 year old internet millionaire" in the minds of many.
Stem cell breakthrough may transform future of medicine
Pay attention to what's going on at the SF Chronicle.

http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/2009/02/25/sf-chronicle-o...

The short of it - unless the paper cuts expenses by somewhere in the range of 50%, Hearst will will sell it. And in this economic climate, that's code for close it; see the Rocky Mountain News (http://www.vimeo.com/3390739) or the Tucson Citizen.

IF the SF Chronicle goes under - making San Francisco the first major metro market without a daily paper - I have no doubt that the displaced journalists and strong startup culture of the area will forge the first steps to a true, information era watch dog journalism.

In short, newspapers need to stop pretending they still cover the news so that the next generation can figure out how to make this work.

And no, citizen journalists and the twitterati are not the answer. Great journalism can only exist when it can support the salary of a great journalist. Otherwise, that journalist WILL go work as a spin doctor for whatever private firm or state government will pay them. I've seen it happen many many times. How can an unpaid citizen journalist match wits with that?
Tokyo Tyrant has different kinds of databases LightCloud has support for all? I think so but just be sure.

Do you have any plans for developing a PHP API for LightCloud?

Thanks for your excellent work. I hope documentation will be improved.
Discuss morality with intelligent people, and study evolutionary psychology, and it will not take you long to realize that every moral system has some edge cases where obeying it will lead to stomach-turning results. Our moral intuitions are lumpy, inconsistent, and contradictory. This is to be expected because we were designed by blind evolution, and not by any sort of logical process.

Ethical systems serve as great guidelines, but it is impossible to find one simple set of consistent ideas to capture everything that an average person feels is right. It is even more impossible (for a non-theist) to find some sort of objective measure of value by which to determine morality.

>"Without this, human actions are no longer guided by reason, and that is a very bad situation."

Human actions are guided by reason, but never solely by reason. We have a lot of innate biases left over from our 3 billion year evolution.

I think you would enjoy this blog:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/
I read the full article, understand the point, and get its relevance to today's circumstances.

That said, I have to admit (and I'm sorry for being way off topic here) I found myself being drawn instead to the overall simplicity of the layout and ease of readability than to the actual message.

It's probably because I'm working on my own stuff and appreciate it when pages are done well (i.e. hacker news).

I looked at the style sheet and it's also very concise.

I know they're using .asp but I'm led to believe capmag.com is fairly easy to maintain.

Please continue using Hacker News to discuss Ayn Rand if you like, but as a developer I thought I'd throw a couple of pennies into the design fountain.
I'd disagree. App Engine places huge restrictions on what you can do. With a bare VM, I can install a database, webserver and go to town. With App Engine, I have to deal with all of the small quirks of their data store.

Examples:

You are doing something location-based and what to find things within 10 miles of a location. With SQL, you can do a crude bounding box query if it doesn't have to be that accurate. You can even do better geometric queries with PostGIS. With App Engine, you can't even do a bounding box query. Inequality queries can only be on one field at a time. Beyond the location example, you can't say get me the items where comment_count > 5 and author_karma > 10.

You can't do joins and so you have to denormalize a lot of data that will perform fine as normalized data.

There is no OR operator at all.

Saying that it allows you to ignore the messy details is like saying that you can avoid having to get egg on your fingers making an omelet if you create a machine that can automatically create food. It is not easier to go with App Engine for the majority of applications which would benefit from simple things that App Engine doesn't support.

It is far easier to scale something written for App Engine. That's the payoff. Even if you have to port away from App Engine, you've still created a data storage strategy that doesn't require joins; you've still moved a lot of the data processing out of the database and into Python manually; you've still made it so that you aren't using any advanced queries. App Engine forces you to write applications in a way that scales. App Engine doesn't allow you to do any of the operations that make programming quick to do. It's a trade-off and depending on whether your application needs it, it can be worthwhile or not.
Kindle's Text-to-Voice Feature Now Optional
With a VPS you have to manage an entire operating system. With shared hosting you usually don't have to manage even a single application (since they usually have "one-click" installers and auto-updaters). For that reason, the vast majority of people would be better off paying $10/month for shared hosting than $10/month for a VPS.
Darwinvaganza
So a bunch of test subjects right now have heavily mutated HIV of a strain that apparently did not get affected by this drug, and could possibly be spreading it. The approach is wrong - if half the clinical patients show no difference, but they now have a randomized sequence of deadly DNA, then this is not a cure, it's a new disease.
The most obvious to me is when you know something should be one of a finite set of values, and its actual value is not in that set. In my compiler, I have to classify array accesses as either a row or a column access. After a certain point, if it's neither (unitialized), then it's a serious error, I can't continue, and I throw an exception. I have similar situations when I deduce the types of an expression. Since I perform transformations on code, I also expect to find certain variables at certain places - if I can't find it anywhere, then I throw an exception.

Some of these are exceptions that I can recover from in that while the compilation is broken, I can still continue to find more errors. Others are show stoppers. I encounter these kinds of errors every time I have to do any decision based on these properties, which is often.
That's assuming you can continue on. Daemons and batch programs are unusual in that every so often, there's a conceptual "wipe clean" and all prior state doesn't matter. These are situations in which you know how to handle an error.

The alternative, to continue on in an error state without knowing how it will effect execution, is worse.
Ask HN: PhD and First Year BSc Grades
I'm nearing the end of my undergrad (bachelor of science) computer science degree with an expected first with honours.
I'm looking at doing a PhD. Funded PhD places are very competetive which is making me think twice due to the fact I have really bad first year grades on my undergrad. They are all passes, whereas my second and third year grades are mainly A's and one or two B's.

Because of the time in which I have to apply I will not have a full transcript, I will only have the first and second year transcript (this year hasn't finished yet) which includes my first year all pass grades, and my second year all A's and one B.

Do you think I could get turned down based on my pretty bad first year?
Linux tips every geek should know
PhD programs care much more about recommendations than grades. The most important thing you can do is get a good recommendation from a professor at your school who's known to whoever you want to work with at the target school.

As for grades specifically, you can probably just tell them the truth, which is that you screwed up freshman year. Grad school admissions are done by smart people (usually the profs themselves). They'll realize that if you got good grades in the later, harder classes, you could have done well in the easier ones.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=482395
What about Objectivism leads to "stomach-turning results"?

(Remember, I don't think we shouldn't worry about what the "average person feels is right"; we should worry about what is actually right.)
memcachedb is not distributed - it only supports replication. I.e. with memcachedb you can only scale reads, but not writes (or at least not without a system like LightCloud on top of it).
I'm not going to agree with SM but I have to agree with their general point: Hacker News isn't the best design, aesthetically or for usability.
Interesting to see vox.com in there, being that it's just a blogging service that could contain a legitimate blog. Why all of vox.com, but not all of wordpress.com, livejournal.com or blogspot.com?
How to Search Facebook Applications | eHow.com
Problem is, I can't actually prove I'm doing/have done really well in my final year because it's not over yet therefore I have no transcript. Although they can clearly see I got 4/5 A's in the second year.
PG is partially guilty of this

But I've been very explicit about this question:

"Great programmers are sometimes said to be indifferent to money. This isn't quite true. It is true that all they really care about is doing interesting work. But if you make enough money, you get to work on whatever you want, and for that reason hackers are attracted by the idea of making really large amounts of money. But as long as they still have to show up for work every day, they care more about what they do there than how much they get paid for it."

(http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html)

"So no, there's nothing particularly grand about making money. That's not what makes startups worth the trouble. What's important about startups is the speed. By compressing the dull but necessary task of making a living into the smallest possible time, you show respect for life, and there is something grand about that."

(http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html)
I think you're right about the whole of her philosophy. I think she has a firm grasp of epistemology, but fails to lay out a well reasoned metaphysical and ethical philosophy.
Have you worked on any significant projects? Have you done any research? Have you published any papers?
That particular site had the Rickroll video and a nasty series of infinite javascript popups. So yes, I was Rickroll'd by Paul Graham, and it crashed my browser.
Do you know of any software for the Mac for creating sounds from scratch?
This used to be a common thing to do in the days of the c64...
Because in those urls the account is a subdomain, so for them a site can be defined as e.g. x.wordpress.com. I don't want to get into representing sites as regular expressions if I can avoid it.
Biggest iPhone Conference Website Hacked in Preparation for Pwn2Own
Was it really necessary to rip off Readernaut's HTML and CSS wholesale?

I mean, Jesus, it's a simple web app. It shouldn't take you more than a few hours to come up with your own design and code.
Talk to more people that disagree with you, I'm sure you can find someone that can present you with an objectivist-flavored ethical dilemma.

Also, you should examine your axioms. There are many self-consistent moral systems starting with different axioms that produce different results. None of these systems is better than the others. Rather, each of these axioms represent something that humans value. They produce contradictory results, but this is not unexpected for reasons previously stated.

For what it's worth, I bought pretty much everything Rand ever wrote and quite a few things by Peikoff. I used to hand out copies of Anthem to friends. It was ideas such as I stated above that lead me away from objectivism. Roughly, I have a different idea of what kind of a beast a human is, and what kind of structure morality is.

Also, I think what the average person feels is right is very pertinent to the discussion of ethics. Attempts to find an objective standard of moral value beyond what humans actually value are usually flimsy and involve a lot of purposeful ignoring of flaws.
UBS Raises Top Bankers’ Salaries as Bonuses Fall
I dislike the implication that corporations have some sort of right to advertise on Google's search engine. Should Wikipedia be worried about antitrust because they refuse to allow /any/ companies 'access to customers'?
Publishing is somewhat difficult for an undergrad as you can't really get published unless you have something original to say/add to a domain of knowledge (that's the whole point of a PhD). Finding the time to research something original while doing undergrad work is something I didn't even think was possible, the last thing you want is a reputation for trying to publish utter crap.
LOL, a lot of Hacker News readers have such a distorted superiority complex of themselves compared to proggit, have any of you actually spent much time with proggit. I dunno about before but works pretty damn good right now, and somehow I'd rather have nerdy startups getting my clicktracks than nerdy VCs. Let's not forget, the reason to be suspicious of groups like HR, VCs, and bean counters is because they really are suspicious-worthy, it's not just fantasy ;-)
I don't think PG is responsible for this any more than the rise of the tech sector (and he defended himself quite sufficiently in his reply). When a new industrial sector emerges, people will get rich, and, well... welcome to the information age.

I think that hackers, however, have an appreciation for the system. Hackers want to learn about complex systems work, but they have a profound respect for those complex systems. Thus, they're not engaged in the business of getting rich no matter what the cost to others.

All the people I know who only want to get rich end up in jobs that promise that. But they are all jobs that reek of unsustainability, like wall street traders and dot-com-type startups with a lot of hype and no business model or valuable contribution to society. These people are selfish and as we're seeing (and have seen during a thousand years of business cycles) their money is gone as quickly as it came.
As of 1355 Sunday it's popping up 502 error.
I get a "502 Bad Gateway" when trying to access the provided link.
You are talking past each other. neilc pointed out that it is easier to go with App Engine, which is probably true. Your criticisms are that App Engine does not have as many features, which is also true. App Engine isn't aimed at "enterprise" so much as it's aimed at "people who don't want to bother setting up a VPS."
Don't worry about it -- I really just found your particular phrasing funny because of its superficial resemblance to that Sacha Baron Cohen line. I was saying that I was off-topic.
If you are ranked very highly in some key courses, then that would help. Having worked on a substantial project or two could help also.

I think most universities also look at your GRE scores.
Disaster strikes when the government steps in to cut ostensibly frivolous expenses, like enormous bonuses for traders for example, which absolutely necessary to conduct business. Traders at America's largest banks are packing up for hedge funds and foreign banks.
Chavez sends troops to Venezuelan rice companies
If asking a question at an official press conference is considered sufficient evidence of a 'vigorous press', we're in trouble.
At least for now, App Engine only supports Python. So the coffin for shared hosting still needs a lot more nails.
There are two ways to enable everything to talk in a slick manner like this: brutal monopoly, or open standards. As evidenced by this video the "new" Microsoft has all sorts of cool ideas, but I'm willing to bet they see the enabler the same way as the "old" microsoft. Brutal monopoly.