skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Greenspun is spot on with most of this, IMO. Singer might be a great ethicist, but he seems to have no concept of the simple rules of economics and industry. I respect his intentions, of course, but good intentions without good information are useless - worse than useless, even.

A country that's short on food should have a powerful, built-in incentive to, you know, grow food. If the elites aren't letting that happen, there's a powerful incentive for the population to oppose them. If there's no economy, it gives incentive to create one. It might be painful for the West to watch as the wheels too-slowly start to turn, but turn they will, eventually.

But in Singer's mind, it's "unethical" to watch this process, so he wants to interfere with foreign aid - removing all local incentives and basically putting an entire country on welfare. And because the whole mainstream society is in the same boat, there's no "social shame" incentives to get off welfare - it just becomes "food from God", or, worse, from the next best thing, the local dictator. Now the country's even worse off, really. They're addicted to foreign aid like Heroin.

It might sound cold but incentives are the only proven way to make anyone do anything. Those incentives don't have to be money - I hope that one day we can get rid of money and work for the pride of recognition, or for some other reasons - but clearly for now, we need money or trade or whatever to motivate people. Take that away, flood a market with free food, and no-one is going to start a farm. Why should they? The incentives are gone. Worse, they've been perverted: better off to try and control the supply of the free food!

It's not impossible, though. If we really do want to provide a baseline food diet for everyone in the world, and it certainly is a noble idea, then we just have to provide a baseline food buying program for everyone in the world, too. You can't buy from one market, strengthening their food industry, to dump on another, destroying theirs. But if you promise to buy from both and distribute a baseline to those in need - maybe it's possible. However, there is the small matter of that you'd be commencing a global experiment in command economy unprecedented in history ;)
The Google Ventures Cheat Sheet
Ubuntu and Debian AMIs for Amazon EC2
Overclocked, perhaps?
Analyst: Just pulling shit out of his ass
World’s Fastest Broadband at $20 Per Home
Of course. Via http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/lather-rinse-repeat-a-tour-o... you can find http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html where they mention "Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience."
The VC walking dead
Return of the Real Programmer
Disclaimer: I have a Java background :)

JRuby is great. If you're building an intranet application in Ruby you should definitely pick up JRuby and Glassfish to host it, that's a no-brainer. And I would also suggest to guys at Engine Yard, Heroku and others to take a closer look at this Ruby implementation. They could save a big buck on it, I suppose.

The startup time is noticeable sometimes that's why I personally prefer developing with MRI, but I use JRuby for deployment and continuous integration.
Using Nginx as a Reverse Proxy to Get the Most Out of Your VPS
Unravel The Music is a small startup; by that I mean we have no money, no financing, and we are owned and operated by two people. Therefore it is important that we get the most out of our server in terms of performance and cost and we have to do this without having to spend hours worrying about the server when we could be improving our design or code.
CCCP is a must. I like Zoomplayer, but that's more personal preference.
Twitter: Building Businesses Tweet by Tweet
Catch headline, but the actual content of the article is that Sun killed SGI and Linux is killing Sun.
'Eureka machine' works out laws of nature
New cosmic map reveals colossal structures
"we have a responsibility to protect your privacy and security" is compatible with forcing users to use real names. It is not compatible with disclosing private data that the user has entrusted to you.
Why Biofuels Are the Rainforest's Worst Enemy
Yeah, but you gotta feel the guy's pain. I mean going from using lisp for your whole life to Java must be pretty mind-numbing. He should have tried to get on a Python project... at least that way he wouldn't have had to go from the most expressive language to the least expressive in one step.
From the abstract:
"We consider here the possibility of quantum gravity induced violation of Lorentz symmetry (LV)."
The paper is such that they mights as well have considered the possibility of gremlin induced violation of LV: it purely theoretical speculation. Mathematical masturbation: look what fun results we can derive if we make this exotic assumption.
"I think that there are some people on this forum that are missing the point. Just because you are a hacker, does not mean that you have the ingredients to make a successful company."

AND?

Who cares?

You are talking as if making a "successful company" is the be all end all and the ultimate objective of hacking.

Hacking is about Hacking, it is not about money, companies, meetings, sub 90 IQ's in suits, etc etc etc
This is really interesting. One using a URL shortener is essentially setting up a parallel DNS infrastructure (like the article said). And there is nothing preventing anyone from doing exactly this right now. One could run a DNS that re-maps any name to any desired IP. The new root "just" have to get people to put down your servers instead of the ones that their ISP or organization gives out.

As with anything where there are multiple equally good ways to do something, there will be people that do it each way:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
I am sorry, that would be NAUSEATING.
Radiology Art
Wow. I just had the same situation with Slicehost. They notified me about the problem, said that there was a five day grace period, and that I could always contact them if I had any problems. They generally replied within the hour to all my e-mails.
Why Did Sergey Brin Stop Blogging?
"Ah yes...there's something magical about hackers that means they can learn business, but "businessmen" can never learn the mystical arts of hacking."

YOU BET!

Sure, some MBA can click on menus or slap whatever together.

That's not hacking.
There are very different meanings about 'knowing a language'. Some people think that they know some language while actually they were just memorized several hundred of common sentences. Other people claims that they know some language, because they can read with permanent use of a dictionary, other think that they are good, while they did not bother to learn correct pronunciation, and so on.

I think it is very hard to know more than two languages well, especially such different like western and eastern ones.

I have a dream, for example, to learn Japanese language, because I'm an anime fan, but I'm also realizing that this is almost impossible for me. Even my very weak English took several years of learning, because learning means practice, and this process is very slow. And if language is really difficult, like the Sanskrit it is impossible for sure.

So, when someone claims that he know some language, I assume that he should have at least 5 years of continuous practice, or it is just an empty claim.
Why is this being down voted, seriously, I'm interested? I figured if you were going to down vote it would be polite to explain your reason(s) to the commenter.
It's not arrogance when it is the truth.

If I could stay awake long enough, that MBA spiel is ELEMENTARY

PLEASE
Most useful I would describe as 'wheels come off if we stop using'. Ours are:
- Quickbooks Online (backoffice/finance)
- Smartsheet (work management/collaboration/file sharing)
- Amazon AWS (hosting infrastructure)

Other services I subscribe to and find work well are:
- Zoomerang (online surveys)
- MyEmma (e-mail marketing)
- GoToMeeting (web conferencing)
- Jott (voice capture and transcription, integrated with Smartsheet)
I enjoyed this post because I feel the same way about Ruby. Many moons ago I used to know C (as in, I didn't have to look every little thing up), Pascal, and even some x86 (for inline use only, mind).

For the last four years I've done nothing by Ruby and.. statically typed languages freak me out now. I know I could do it, but if it's not as super easy as Ruby I'm not all that interested anymore even though there are probably plenty of cool projects I could be using C, C++, Objective C, or whatever for.
Notice how bright the suits are?

The people that would get into that, are EXACTLY the kind of people that they need least.
FWIW: The Google Sites link says that it's down because it "exceeded its Pageview limit"
If he's cleared of any involvement, this suggests Simpson may revive his business through the publicity. ( The "just spell my name right" approach to marketing. )
on further thought, it doesn't matter than it will match underscores, because the list of domains shouldn't have any underscores in them, but you would still want to look for underscores (maybe)

^nano[\w-]+\w+.com$
smashing magazine lists are usually pretty bland but I liked this one, some common sense but non obvious tips.

Laying out a good grid is fundamental to good design, you dont have to know how to make fancy illustrations et but you can make a solid professional design with just a little consideration about the grid.

It saves people like me who value design but are terrible at coming up with creative aesthetics.
# One-way mirror policy to protect startups from prying eyes.
"We can look into Google, but Google can’t look into the companies without asking," promises Miner.

and then they say:

# But that doesn’t mean strategic considerations will be ignored either.
"If a company comes in the door and it looks like something important for Google to acquire," says Maris,
"we will defer to Google’s corporate development department to take a look."

So pretty much Google won't look at your startup, unless the guys running things get the idea that what you are doing might be interesting to Google, so how exactly does that protect startups from Google getting a full look about your company?
Virtual Carding
No, it's not unethical. It's downright criminal. It's called fraud. Someone is being misled into supplying someone else with labor. What are the falsehoods? The purported benefits to be obtained in exchange for the labor.
I'll submit that it's safer to show your startup to GV than to a regular VC. A regular VC has a whole mess of portfolio companies, across many vintage funds, to share your stuff with (and in the case of DFJ, a whole 'nother mess of associated funds).

The odds that Google will rip off your idea to build something in-house as quickly as you can are astronomically small.
This ~post~ doesn't exactly lay out a conceivable scenario, but...
It might serve as a reminder of Hamlet's guidance:

"Believe none of us. We are errant knaves all."

Or at least all business operations are subject to unknown/unforeseeable weaknesses.

In the post-Hamlet era it's: "In God we trust. The rest we backup elsewhere."
Did I miss it, or did that article not explain how it somehow cost $600 more per American home to upgrade here than in Japan? They touched on competition, but it seemed like that was only for the final service, not necessarily for the supplies. I thought maybe homes were more compacted so it was easier to upgrade multiple homes.
Classic delicious Firefox extension (better than the bookmarklet)
I've been using is.gd for a couple of reasons. First, "is.gd" is nice and short, and I find it extremely easy to type. The flow from key to key is very smooth. After that, the is.gd home page loads very quickly.

However, I find that the biggest advantage of is.gd , in comparison to bit.ly, cli.gs, TinyURL, etc, is the initial placement of the cursor.

On is.gd's home page, the cursor is placed in the text field, so all you need to do is paste your long URL, and hit enter. On the resulting page, the compressed URL is highlighted for you! So all you need to do is hit CMD+C/CTRL+C, and voila, the compressed URL is in your clipboard.
BakerTweet: @thehungry, the donuts are fresh
I have trouble buying that the technology is hitting a plateau. If that happens then what you will see a couple houses make a killing off blockbusters while the rest of the industry are making "safe" projects. But I wouldn't hold my breath on that either.
IBM And Sun: There Will Be Blood
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?HeroicProgramming
Ok, let's see some numbers. What percentage of the African GDP comes from foreign aid? What percentage of Africa is fed by free food? The ability of both sides of this issue to avoid discussing numbers is nothing short of alarming. You make these blanket statements like "They're addicted to foreign aid like Heroin." Really?

There's some good discussion on:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/04/another-call-to-end-ai...

It's entirely possible to conclude that aid isn't helping Africa, but it's asinine to say that it's the primary cause for Africa's economic problems, unless you're willing to examine the numbers.
That 1 1/2 star rating on Amazon is pretty meaningless because most of the 1 star reviews were from people JUST railing about the DRM regardless of whether they'd played the game or not.

I'm no friend of DRM, but if I were Amazon, I'd have deleted those reviews because of their specious nature.

I didn't like Spore all that much myself, however there's another Will Wright game that I didn't like all that much: The Sims. I thought that was boring as hell, but a lot of people seemed to like it, so you might understand why EA thought it would be wise to advertise the game heavily.
The Truth About the Best Forex Strategies and Training Courses For Beginners
Read a history of Fortran. It was originally meant for a human to compile into machine code.
This comment suggests you don't understand my point. Which is basically that people will act in their own individual interest even when its obvious that if everyone does the same thing, bad things are the inevitable result.
[Note: I can't read the original link -- the site is down -- so I have no idea what the original submitter said. But let me take a guess about what you're saying.]

Try to put yourself in Twitter's shoes. Your viral app is a fantastic, unprecedented success. Your traffic is doubling every week. The Fail Whale is onscreen so much that it has its own name, its own fan club, and its own T-shirts. Techcrunch is rumbling about all the other entrepreneurs who are setting up to clone your service.

The idea that a language-level change to Ruby is a wise thing to pursue at this point is insane. Ruby has a big and complicated code base. You are not a language designer. You probably won't even figure out what you could do that would help. If you do, the change will probably result in an internal-only fork of Ruby that can't be reliably patched and that is incompatible with a random cross-section of your third-party libraries. Deploy that thing and you will be finding and fixing Heisenbugs all over the codebase for the next six months.

To actually get an official change into Rails takes months, minimum. In the case of Ruby that might stretch into a year or two. Because you must first win a series of online arguments, and then you must wait for lots and lots of third parties to test your change against their apps and libraries and report or fix the bugs.

Yep, much cheaper to just rewrite your whole stack using different infrastructure. Several times, if necessary, as experiments. Twitter is expert at rebuilding their own stack -- what has been done before is easier to do again.
What're your thoughts on FPS? Can you post a link to one of your sites using it? Thanks
I can see how a machine like this can help in situations where we have lots of data and plenty of alternative hypotheses to test, like for example the work the Adam robot is doing in molecular biology and genomics : it sifts through dozens of known genes to find the one that is responsible for a certain enzyme. This is very keen to a large search in a huge search-space. However, it still needs fitness criteria to be defined by humans - in Adam's case, how does it know the gene is responsible for the enzyme ? The experiment to assert that was designed by humans.

Furthermore, there are sciences like neurobiology where we have lots of disparate data and due to increasing sensor resolution, we are getting reams more. What is needed are theories to explain it, and thus shed lights on the underlying mechanisms. This kind of unifying theory is much more complex than newtonian mechanics - with no offense, I hope, to the great Sir Isaac Newton.

Furthermore, the Eureka machine was already studying the right experimet which generated the right data - from which Newton's laws were obvious. Sir Isaac Newton had to decide, among many other things, which was the right phenomenon to consider, and from which angle - and all this against huge cultural biases against "simplistic" and "mechanical" laws that might restrain God's power.
Shouldn't we all be treating this like just another VC? Everyone seems to be caught up in the fact that it's money coming from Google. But at the end of the day, it's money coming from an investor.

Obviously, because it's Google, they will be doing it differently. A couple of hints they give us are that they will "focus on seed and early stage startups across any industry". So obviously, amounts will be different than typical VCs. Also, the fact that it is pretty much a two person team (or that's how they are representing themselves), makes me think they are not offering the mentoring of a YC or the management of a VC.
I second the request for pros and cons of FPS
surely if Google is looking to acquire they won't be interested in copying it?

And Google can always have a full look at your company - by approaching it for acquisition. It seems like a moot point, honestly - Google isn't exactly short of people with great ideas.
South Korea is currently ~2.5% of global GDP, China ~6%. The UK is ~3.9%. South Korea is legitimately a big deal, and writing off that market would be dumb, by the most conservative estimate its the 16th biggest economy in the world, and its internet active population is waaay above trend, so its even more important for Google than that alone would suggest.
I would assume that the combination of denser residentials and fewer suburbs in Japan has everything to do with the cost difference. When you can upgrade 10 homes in Japan with the same space of 1 home in the US, and there are no sprawling suburbs to lay long runs of cable, it's easy to grasp that per-person price gap.

That's still no excuse for the floundering broadband speeds in this country. I live in Rochester, NY, where Time Warner announced that on top of the "10Mbps" that I never get as it is, they'll be introducing capped plans, with a maximum cap of only 40GB! And I can't just take my money elsewhere, because the city granted them a monopoly; my only other options are horrible DSL that has a 25GB cap, ClearWire broadband at 1/10 the speed I have now, or dial-up. There's absolutely no competition!

It's no wonder Time Warner chose my town for second-round "evaluations"; nobody can leave Time Warner because of this policy, so of course they'll "find" that people are "happy" with the caps. It disgusts me!
I can't read the original article right now. So I must poke around in the darkness when trying to respond. Sorry if I'm being unfair.

But it sounds like we're once again enmeshed in the never-ending process of second-guessing Twitter. Let me offer a pertinent quote, from the Hugo-winning novel The Vor Game:

[You did] a right thing. Perhaps not the best of all possible right things. Three days from now you may think of a cleverer tactic, but you were the man on the ground at the time. I try not to second-guess my field commanders.

Twitter solved their problem. It is unlikely that they did so as elegantly as possible, and it's quite possible that their logic at the time will be of no use to the rest of us at all, because it was based on incomplete information about a rapidly-changing software universe.
Jeff Bezos Quotes
D.C. (School) Vouchers: Better Results at a Quarter the Cost
Great customer service trumps - A story of a little known company
But as soon as you incorporate, take on cofounders and investors, and adopt a title, you're essentially working at the direction of the organization. Your equity is likely subject to a vesting schedule and (given the right constellation of agreement among the other founders and investors) you could even be 'let go'.

Also, the IRS doesn't enforce minimum wages and labor laws, so its definitions aren't necessarily relevant. (For example, it will tax equity compensation that doesn't count toward minimum wage calculations.)

So you may be right, but I'm not yet convinced. The strict letter of the law seems to suggest that corporations must pay even their founders minimum wages.

And if there's some 'bright-line' rule that clearly tells us when this is not the case, I've never heard it. (For example, if "5%" is traditionally enough ownership, by statute or administrative ruling, to count someone as an owner rather than employee, that would be very good to know -- you could have exactly 20 equal founders and no investors and still have founders bootstrap with their own donated labor.)
World is full of hackers. Some hackers are good...some are bad. He needs to choice his site in this thing. If he is "good" hacker, i suggest continue, if he is "bad" hacker, he can hack into government networks without getting caught. But if he gets caught, he goes to jail for a long time, maybe less than 10 years.
Summary: Real programmers (not complimentary) don't document, don't maintain, always do things the hard way because that's the only way to get bragging rights, object strenuously to giving up even a little freedom in order to make it harder to make mistakes. Oldskool RPs programmed in hard things like assembler, which at least forced you to know your way around algorithims and memory management. The new breed do not have that saving grace.

Commentary: It sounds like the difference between a Real Programmer and a good hacker is skill, documentation and math/data structures/algorithims. I can't remember which essay it was in but pg recommended always doing things the hard way because if it even occured to you to do things the hard way, it's probably because you can see a benefit from it already, and it makes it much harder for competitors to catch up if you do this consistently.
At a guess, a few reasons. Firstly, they had everything else written against a message queue with particular behaviour - so better to upgrade that queue than switch to a completely new one and have to rewrite everything that interacts with it.

Secondly, after running a custom message queue for well over a year they know EXACTLY what they need from one, so writing their own still makes sense.

Thirdly, if they're going to start moving other core bits of Twitter infrastructure to Scala it makes sense to try it out with an important piece of the puzzle that they thoroughly understand first.

And finally, Twitter's core competency is delivering messages. As such, it's really not so extreme to use their own software to do that - they work at a high enough scale that they need to be experts in whatever solution they are using.

As Douglas Crockford once said, "The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round one.". The fact that Twitter's reliability over the past 6-12 months has been a huge improvement, despite the enormous growth the service has seen (it's mentioned in the mainstream media all the time) would suggest that their decision to roll their own message queue paid off.