skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A bit, now that you mention it.
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Oh.. I better put a warning.. its a bit of a long read, but somewhat light hearted..
Peacekeeper: The Browser Benchmark
Mark Zuckerberg, top VCs drop off Forbes’ billionaire list
A Brief Thought On Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer
As many of you must be aware, Stewart and Cramer have been exchanging words for the past few days. Tonight it all culminated with Cramer coming on Stewart's show. Perhaps the most intense part of the interview was when Stewart said:

"I understand you want to make finance entertaining, but it's not a [expletive] game," Stewart said during the recorded interview, segments of which aired on Thursday night. "When I watch that, I can't tell you how angry that makes me."

I love that Stewart is turning a much needed critical eye towards the finance industry, but how about applying the same standard (using Jon's words above) to the press itself?

Link in case you have not been following the situation:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/TV/03/13/cramer.stewart/index.html
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I can't wait to read the source code of this. I think it will be a great way to learn development and design on App Engine.
I'm afraid I'm going against the Unix idiom of combining simple tools to do more advanced stuff, I can't resists here ;_)

While it is idiomatic in Unix to use xargs for parallelising batch runs I found it pretty cumbersome because you have to be really careful with quotes, file names and command lines with spaces to make sure the command line will be "nice" in order to not fuck up something serious.

Moreover, xargs does have its uses but I mostly find I use it for trivial things where I can be sure it works. The xargs idiom seems to be fed a list of files, even more typically from the find command, as in "find . -name _out | xargs rm -r". That's the reason there's -0 in xargs while there's the matching -print0 in find.

I wrote a small utility myself (http://code.google.com/p/spawntool/) that reads from stdin and treats each line as a complete command line that is directly passed to system(), and then manages the parallelisation up to N processes.

This is pretty useful for feeding in _any_ batch of commands, even unrelated (not derived from a list of files). You could also feed the same input stream or file straight to 'sh' (for compatibility cross-checking) or you could verify the input command lines in plaintext before daring with either sh or spawntool. This would be like ... | xargs sh without the white-space and expansion head-aches.

It's pretty easy to generate complete command lines yourself and much safer than letting xargs join stuff together.
Understanding actor concurrency
Full Uncensored Interview of Jim Cramer on the Daily Show
Full uncensored interview of Jim Cramer on the Daily Show.

part 1: http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=221516&title=jim-cramer-interview-outtake

part 2: http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=221517&title=jim-cramer-interview-outtake

part 3: http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=221518&title=jim-cramer-interview-outtake
Facebook Getting Serious About Vanity URLs
This work is inspiring given the large number of relentlessly fearful people claiming we're in a new Great Depression, particularly those who speculate in the financial markets. If only these people would focus on creating wealth and making something people want!
Submit Checkbox values in Form with javascript
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Anyone who equates liberals=intellectual or conservative=anti-intellectual hasn't bothered to swallow the real bitter pill of the article: the idea that liberal cultural relativism is no less anti-intellectual than religious fundamentalism. Sorry for the mouthful :-)
Society's vital networks prone to 'explosive' changes
Me too. Do you (or others) also want to build something on top of it?
DOnt forget this was several years ago - some of the technology was not a minature as it might be now :)
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2 Million Minutes
Twitter and the value of real-time search
Having just been burgled last week (my flat, not my data centre) and lost 3 laptops, including a precious macbook pro, to it, I can certainly relate to the feeling of insecurity.

After I was burgled I was reminded of a chinese proverb, that goes along the lines of: "A room full of jade and gold, nothing can guard it." The point of it is that if people know you have lots of precious stuff in your room, you won't be able to stop them from breaking in eventually.

In my case, my laptops were visible from the street while I worked (my home office faces the street), even though I normally close the curtains in the evening, and that was probably the determining factor in drawing the burglars in. They only needed to notice the laptops once and then keep hanging around until they saw an opportunity.

As far as data centres are concerned, qualified thieves will obviously know for a fact that there's good stuff to be had there. If you do have such expensive, custom equipment, perhaps the only thing you can do to protect yourself is to disguise it as something else. You can't disguise the whole data centre, but you can disguise racks.

One possible way to do this on a large scale would be to render the server cabinets opaque, so that there is no way to identify the high-price ones from the lower price ones. This would make it harder for the thieves to "do business", so to speak, so they may head elsewhere because it's just not convenient.
A useful heuristic in most cases. I hope it does not work for this one. ;o)
With respect, I am not sure that this beginners lesson has a place on this forum.
Yes.

[Though perversely they do influence the success of 'their' team. Where do you think the money comes from?]
Indians aren't well rounded nor creative, are they?
Oh well, it's in french. Here is a link to something I put online last year:

http://grandpapier.org/La-presse-independante

But most of what I publish is in print, and some is out-of-print. I know I should put more effort in making my things available, but this definitely has a lower priority than making new comics.

(hrm. I notice only now I was replying to a comment by pg. It made absolutely no sense to write 'same here')
Anyone who is familiar with both care to compare this with laconica?
uhh, the article attacks her as a scientist because they feel technology like this is dehumanizing, by focusing on the potential downsides. Of course they don't realize that if you could quickly find out that you and someone else having something in common, your friendship might blossom and instead of not starting.

Also, this notion that our lives depend on whether we think demo technology is cool or not is pretty crazy.
I personally use "iostat -xk 1" which shows the values in kilobytes rather than blocks (easier to read) and updates every second.
RWH is great too, but the topics are very different. RWH is about using functional programming. CTM is about a lot of different paradigms. It starts with a simple core language, and a set of features, like dataflow variables, lazy evaluation, higher order functions, concurrency, ports (message passing queues), mutable state, backtracking. Then it explores what happens if you take a subset of these features. For example dataflow variables + concurrency is deterministic concurrency. Mutable state + higher order functions can support object oriented programming. Ports + concurrency is an Erlang like model.

Lazy functional programming is just one of these models (higher order functions + laziness). CTM shows that other models can be beautiful and powerful too.
On #8, I was surprised that this hack worked at all, especially in what must have been a terribly expensive alarm system. It should have been monitoring for changes in both voltage and resistance, and tripping the alarm if the circuit fluctuated.

If nothing else, it would help detect a failing component.
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Open Source Companies, Products And People To Follow On Twitter
One thing on Twitter that can be a little tricky is to find the right people you would like to connect with. If you are looking for some influential companies and people in the open source world to follow then this article will get you started. It's my #followfriday and my hat tip to some awesome folks.
Be careful not to confuse common thievery with the Hollywood style, or the occasional case like this one.

The vast majority of thievery is simply bashing car windows or taking advantage of naivete.
Interactive map of Linux Kernel
I agree with you that my comparison of Flynn with Gould was not entirely fair. Flynn found the Flynn effect which is an important part. But a book by Flynn is not peer reviewed and may be influenced by his political views (he is author of “How to Defend Humane Ideals: Substitutes for Objectivity” after all).

> Anyway, scientific issues aren't decided by credentials, but by data.

This is true – but data in peer reviewed journals not books.

> In other words, what Jensen and others took as a "culture fair," "g-loaded" IQ test turns out to reflect modifiable educational experiences that children have or do not have.

The majority of psychologists believe that the g-factor is an innate and immutable property. The g-factor correlates with reaction times, glucose metallisation rate and is highly heritable. This indicates that the g-factor most likely have a neurobiological basis (see articles by Haier for example).

In a recent article the g-factor also appeared in a battery of 42 tests (Johnson,W Bouchard, TJ, “Just one g: consistent results form three test batteries”). Here is a quote from the abstract:

> The concept of a general intelligence factor or g is controversial in psychology. Although the controversy swirls at many levels, one of the most important involves g's identification and measurement in a group of individuals. If g is actually predictive of a range of intellectual performances, the factor identified in one battery of mental ability tests should be closely related to that identified in another dissimilar aggregation of abilities. We addressed the extent to which this prediction was true using three mental ability batteries administered to a heterogeneous sample of 436 adults. Though the particular tasks used in the batteries reflected varying conceptions of the range of human intellectual performance, the g factors identified by the batteries were completely correlated (correlations were .99, .99, and 1.00). This provides further evidence for the existence of a higher-level g factor and suggests that its measurement is not dependent on the use of specific mental ability tasks.
I like the look of your service. It always seem to me that when you start pushing these low price-points, the expense of dealing with customer support, DMCA takedowns, hacking complaints etc would dominate the cost of providing the hardware and bandwidth. I expect this is why Linode and Slicehost don't go below the $20 price point. Do you find this to be a problem - are you valuing your time at a very low value? Perhaps you avoid this to an extent, I expect your low profile and simple web design helps keep away problem customers.

I really think it would be worth the investment in time to provide an auto-provisioning system and some more images for the major Linux distributions. Linode gets by booting a standard kernel for all distributions (with the option of pv-grub for your own), which might reduce the support cost and is probably more convenient for most customers. Also, are you running Xen 3.3 now? (the Kernel compatability page on your wiki indicates not, though I thought pv-grub was new to Xen 3.2 or 3.3).
Yes. Taking into account that Indian founders have less opportunity costs in traditional companies and almost equal earnings potential in a startup, this should be interesting.
Living the rest of your live on $100k can be done easily. But you have to move into a cheap country.
I just (voluntarily) left a comfortable job at a behemoth corporation to start my own company with a friend from college. I thought I was being brave, but apparently I'm just succumbing to a fad?

I don't think it's that starting a business is "cool"; I mean, I guess it is, in some sense, although paying for your own health care isn't very cool. For me, this quote was apt:

"People’s attitudes to security and risk also changed. If a job in a big organisation can so easily disappear, it seems less attractive. Better to create your own."

It's not just about job security. After spending two years in a large corporation, I firmly believe that these shops provide less security, less on-the-job learning, less valuable experience, less opportunities to improve society, and in many cases less pay than ambitious young people can achieve otherwise. IMO, working at a large corporation, now more than ever, is an excellent way for you to hide, duck for cover, and defensively draw a paycheck. And mediocre people who take this posture are very clever indeed about ensuring they won't be laid off.

But if you actually want to do something meaningful with your life and happily spend your days working on a project you believe in, big corporations will rarely satisfy your needs.

Although I had a relatively good experience in my two years at my behemoth corporation (my last day is today, incidentally), the best thing I learned is how I'd rather not repeat the experience. I also look back on the two years and think that my most memorable moments (even technical achievements) happened outside of work.

With the means of production well within my grasp as a software engineer, and with big corporations going into a holding pattern and nixing interesting projects just to "keep the lights on", it seems like a no-brainer. For me, entrepreneurship isn't cool -- it's the only rational option.
Google Map of Google Data Centers
Wait, it wasn't?
Xubuntu 8.10 + Xfce 4.6: Screenshots
Ask HN: please review my Firefox extension
I am actually in awe of this guy right now [:D], man, this is some really exciting profession, thievery, its more like an art ! This story was better than any episode of Hustle !
Two serious problems with the article (though I didn't read every word). First, he says:

What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?

I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutability is one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific.

This falsifiability criterion is what determines whether a theory is scientific, but there is a larger category of theories which are not all empirically testable yet are subject to rational criticism, and are therefore rational, though we must generally hold them with a lower degree of confidence than we do our scientific theories.

In fact, his very claim is an example of a rational yet non-scientific theory! For he himself has not provided us with the evidence it would take to prove his theory that evidence is necessary wrong! And so we see that there are meaningful, important ideas which can be judged on criteria other than evidence (in this case, internal contradiction, though that is far from the only criterion).

Second:

But the view that we all start out curious and creative, and have those qualities systematically stifled, fails to address some core questions. Why should it be possible to stifle these qualities at all? If there are people who see benefit from stifling curiosity and creativity, why should those benefits outweigh the benefits of encouraging curiosity and creativity? And assuming that there are people with a vested interest in stifling curiosity and creativity, why should they be able to prevail over those members of society who value curiosity and creativity? If curiosity and creativity are general traits of human beings, anti-intellectualism should be a rare and aberrant phenomenon. It should be regarded as a variety of mental retardation, or a condition as undesirable as impotence. The only possible conclusion is that there is something fundamentally wrong with this model of human nature.

This is certainly not the only possible conclusion. Only if you presume that human behavior never has unintended consequences must you think that someone must see themselves as "benefiting" from an act in order to do it. The simple fact is that our educational institutions do do tremendous damage to curiosity and creativity, and they do so despite having the exact opposite motivation.

Further, his examples of civilizations that failed to make various or other accomplishments (Sub-Saharan Africans, Romans, etc.) is only evidence that problem-solving is hard, and that the innate curiosity that human beings are born with is not enough. We need a good tradition of scientific and rational discovery to complement our innate curiosity, in order to create great things.
A bit of Jackson Browne
I'd like that less for two reasons.

1. I like to know that my service will improve. No sense in getting a service that prices below initial cost and won't see improvement for 4 years because of that.

2. It makes it impossible for people to buy equipment if they don't have capital. These services either need loans, VC, or cashflow to continue expanding and the last is the best.
I wrote this extension a while back and I'm wondering what you guys (and gals) think. It uses DirectedEdge's API (they are regulars here, thanks guys!). Are the "popup bubbles" useful? Any suggestions for improvement or new features would be very helpful.
On top of that, most browsers already have support for GreaseMonkey scripts.

Opera has it built in. IE has http://www.gm4ie.com/ . WebKit has http://8-p.info/greasekit/ . Chrome http://greasemetal.31tools.com/ and will likely have it built-in. And, of course, FireFox has GreaseMonkey itself.

But the author wants some kind of proxy that works for all browsers, even if they don't have GM support or even anything like plugin support.
Agreed. This isn't an interesting trick or hack of any kind, it's just one up from Hello World in HTML.
Why does HN show the domain as (.kmuto.jp) with that leading dot?
Human minds are not formal logical systems. We don't have axioms per se (that is, a belief or desire held with absolute certainty from which all of our other ideas follow). This is true even when we think we believe something axiomatically.

Another way of thinking of this is that our ideas are not a hierarchy with one level at the bottom and each level as the foundation for the next. Instead, they form a "heterarchy" -- a complex, twisted network of interconnections, where the right argument or experience can modify what previously seemed to be the most deeply-held idea.
Thanks for your reply, gives me some things to think about :)
Sometimes I tell people I run a small business. I've done that many different things though, I'm not always sure what I do these days!
Wow, I didn't know that you could get a 32GB/8-core server for only $2,000. That makes the economics of it a lot less scary (and your prices a lot more understandable - I was a little worried that they you were significantly underselling your costs).

I do like that larger RAM servers are cheaper. I hope all your images don't sell too quickly once you get the new box provisioned! Oh, what do you charge for bandwidth overages? Not that I have a ton of traffic, but still.

Also, play up your history. Knowing that you've been around since 05 makes you a ton more credible - you aren't a me-too service and rather someone that's coming into their own.
Thanks! frameworks would certainly make things easier now that you've mentioned it. I've dabbled with django and web.py but never thought of a php framework (which i'm probably more comfortable with than python).
Why the move to Manila? What is the difference in your opinion? Has it made success harder?
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It's kind of strange talking about the right to kill oneself. Of course, we mean that each of us is the master of our fate but it just sounds strange to read that someone has a right to kill oneself. If one didn't, what would happen if one ignored the fact that he doesn't have right to do it?

Anyway, I'd say it this way. I have never been there when I thought there's no other way out, maybe for a fraction of time but that may indicate I've never been in situations where people like Tony have been. So I can't really say with certainty how I'd behave in a situation like that but I can say this: The life isn't just a possession, it's, as far as we know, a remarkable gift and since nobody knows for sure what's beyond that, it's really tricky thinking whether it's better to--just not be any more. Are we sure we would be better off if we just weren't alive anymore? This brings in a lot more questions and answers depend solely upon what you believe. I believe I will always be better off by being rather than not being, until of course the time comes for that. A friend of mine, God I don't know how he's now, used to half joke saying he likes to feel pain every morning even though he could barely dress himself and function normally due to his illness, but feeling pain every morning meant that he is still alive.

But as someone already said here, what Tony did prior to disappearing was a clear call for help, even though maybe not so clear to himself. I'm hoping he finds the strength to fight indefinitely now that he can clearly see the support he has from his friends and community. I wish people close to him realize what he needs most right now is support and understanding for his condition, no matter what some people say. No one can tell for sure what he feels. A life is a serious matter, not to be taken lightly. Unfortunately, too many people find out about that too late.
Not about code/software/hacking.
Dont check this unless you want to waste some time