skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good article by a mother who is obviously in distress. I liked this because it reminds me of some of the really tough lessons people learn growing up.

You can reach a high level of anxiety when you believe two things at the same time that do not co-exist. In this case, the mother believed she should be supportive of her son no matter what and she also believed that her son was a monster and might be a monster. One does not support monsters. Yet one supports one's son no matter what.

The answer, of course, is that your parental duties require you to be a disinterested observer at times. Tough love is real love. But just saying that doesn't mean people can learn it. Information is not the same as the knowledge.

And then there is the romanticizing of disease. My wife used to work with kids with Down's Syndrome. This was for very young children. Usually the nurses and doctors would have a good idea of what was happening and it was a matter of confirming it and educating the parents. What she found was that the average parent, when confronted with somebody with a chronic disease, had a hopelessly romantic view due to Hollywood and "feel good" press about that disease.

That's not saying that you shouldn't hope, or that you should be cynical. But most kids with Down's have a very limited life. Most families with a Down's kid have to work very hard. It's a labor of love, sure, but it's not a movie. Most times it's a lifetime endeavor. Not everybody is made for doing it. There's nothing wrong with admitting that your personality type is not good for taking intensive care of a kid for your entire life. The distance between feel-good stories about things and the actual things themselves is huge.

It's easy to get in a cognitive bind like this mom. I hope that writing the essay helped her come to grips with the fact that her son is a monster. And there's nothing wrong with admitting it.
You're right, I forgot about the radiosity - but couldn't that still be split up to multiple cores per frame? i.e. simulate one "bundle" of photons per core, and then presuming that you're not too badly i/o bound, you should be able to do some sort of map/reduce. Each would generate a separate scene of light, and you would add them all together to make the final frame.
creative commons licensed
I have to agree with you completely.

It's not hard to marry someone you know very well. The problem is that like the article said, a lot of people are pressured and they end up getting married before they really know each other. I met my wife online and we got married three years later. The judge commented that most couples he married who met online did it after about a year.

A few months before our 5th anniversary we decided to get divorced. A few weeks before that same anniversary we changed our minds. Will we, won't we. Who knows.

People change; accept that and learn to enjoy it. But as you said, some people's deeply held core values will probably remain the same and that's really what you're marrying.

As an aside, when I saw the article on HN my first thought was that someone was making analogy between marriage and startup partnerships :-)
Merging PDFs With PDFBox
Merging Portable Document Format documents using PDFBox couldn't be simpler. The developer(s) of PDFBox has taken care of all of the hard work and encapsulated it in one class of their Application Programming Interface. All you need to do is use it.
He lost me when he linked to an article by Satoshi Kanazawa.
Instead of addressing my questions, you went with the ad hominem and called me a sycophant. Nice one.

Love your generalisation about blogging and (alleged) punditry being a primary responsibility too - because clearly SO many CEOs take this responsibility in their stride.
I've played "Das verrückte Labyrinth" in this way with a friend on two Nintendo DS.
Theres nothing interesting to read here.... move along.
Any official talking about this will say "Argentina" or "Russia" because it is politically incorrect to say "Weimar Republic".
There are no frictionless newtonian particles either.

But they remain a useful object to think about; under the right conditions, they are a good approximation to the real world. You can also add corrections to the model (i.e. add terms to the equations) and do an even better job at modeling the real world.
So, by that token, would you consider the latest Microsoft ads scammy (maybe even fraudulent)?

They feature Lauren, apparently a real person, looking for a laptop under $1000. Turns out she is an actress, which would also affect the likely veracity of the ad as well.
http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/165113.asp

Advertising, by its very definition, is only meant to promote a product. Just turn on your TV, you will see plenty of misleading advertising that's not really illegal.

Would you be OK with Parrot Secrets if the owner paid for a real American girl who owns a parrot to be a spokesperson? I just don't see the reason for the outrage when an Indian guy is the marketer instead of a multibillion dollar conglomerate.
Imagine submitting a picture of yourself and finding out what the internet knows about you based on your physical appearance.

Actually I think this sort of technology would be just as useful for the dating sites to help weed out potential fake profiles.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss: Real World Django
its back again!
I checked out girishr's submissions and they're all from abcphp.com
I had exactly the same thought as I started skimming this: uh oh, first decide what convention you are going to use. Or do you do that last?
This works really well.

For some cool examples, check out http://tineye.com/cool_searches

Also, I recommend that you click the "compare images link" under each result image after you perform a search, to see which part it matched.

I've used tineye several times, and it's found the sources of heavily photoshopped images before. They've done a great job.
Myseohost.com - A Web hosting blog
A Web hosting cum SEO blog which helps you understand the complex methods of search engine optimization and web hosting
Sony Ericsson Down by Half in Few Months
Sharding is a technique used mostly in the MySQL to overcome MySQLs horrible performance issues once the database gets bigger than what can be contained in RAM.

It also alliviates some of the pains associated with big tables, since MySQL doesn't hava hash-joins and hence has to do row lookups when joining multiple tables. This obviously goes to hell if you are trying to join more than a few rows.

Basically you are not too far off when you say "horizontal partioning", as this (again as far as I have understood it) is a very specific implementation for this.

Basically you partition your data horizontally across multple servers using some predefined/known system and have the client figure out which server it should connect to to get the actual data it needs.

This completely kills the ability to do efficient joins, blows up any ability to sanely implement referential integrity, makes a mess of your code and really has few advantages besides making MySQL able to scale.

People using proper database systems wouldn't know this technique as it is ass backwards in any way you would want to approach databases, is not needed, since most good DBs can handle databases bigger than whatever RAM the server has, not to mention that since it would dislalow efficient joins, this would actually be a way to decrease performance as opposed to improving it.
I'm an activist for prison reform. Happy now?
Yeah, I expected he'd come up with a Top Ten(tm).
Few buyers at Ocean Tomo high-tech auction
So the article points at it being a psychological condition - fair enough - and, as with many conditions, exacerbated or originated by one's parenting. I can swallow that.

But the mention of consumers believing they deserved big, shiny houses financed by bad debt got me. Surely that was as much a problem with society's attitudes to debt, money, and rewards - including pressure to keep up with the Joneses - as the person's own narcissism?

It's one thing to think you deserve a shiny new house, or computer, or whatever, and quite another to have society enabling that narcissism by giving you credit. It obviously depends on the person, but having recently been offered a credit deal - even in this economy! - that really shouldn't have been extended to me* , I'm very aware of what some people will throw at you to flatter your vanity, and I do think it's part of the mix too.

* I rejected it, but my inner narcissist had a big cry about it.
Bak may be a computing genius, but he didn’t touch a computer until he was at university.

Wow. I wonder how many 10x programmers got their start in college.
Erdös and the Quantum Method
Ask YC: Wattvision vs. Black & Decker EM100B
I learned yesterday of B&D's product: http://bit.ly/frag

Any chance the Wattvision team would comment on how their offering (beyond the obligatory social networking component) is different?

I assume the question came up during Demo day.
Well, Idée is an established business that already does the IP search service. This is a new service, but not necessarily for the same purpose.
These guys already make money doing exactly that. This is a new service from a well-established small company.
On Complexity: when you can't even get time right
> free printer access

Did you get free printer access? That is unfair - we had to pay for everything - bandwidth and printer access.
I think this is one of the major reasons that Americans have so many divorces. They marry for the "feelings", and as soon as those change they want out. The Indians marry for more than that - financial support, children, family name, cultural pressure, etc. The end result is that they are interested in making it happen, and are willing to work for that, whereas Americans think that the fact that it might require effort proves that they are "incompatible".

Imagine if someone tried to run a startup the way most Americans try to manage their marriages; they wouldn't last a week before they gave up - the "feeling" probably wouldn't be there, and there would be something else they'd rather do.

If both you and your spouse want the marriage to work, it can work, whether you "feel" for each other or not. The problem is really when they don't want it to work, and need an excuse.
This 25 year old is enjoying a new high paying job (that he absolutely loves) after leaving the military. After one month of employment we've eliminated half our credit card debt and will tackle the rest over the course of the next six months. We're currently shopping for our second vehicle and educating ourselves on the VA Home Loan process as we intend to buy a home at the end of the year.
Although this article was interesting, it gives a pretty hazy and sometimes inaccurate description of NPD (it seems to confuse the dissorder with antisocial personality dissorder at times).
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/marapr/feat...

I think the article you refer to was another article on the same body of research, but I like this article as a best first introduction to that topic.
Play doom and re-use your virtual sofa as a shared display
Americans spend 8 hours a day on screens
There were some bugs on HN yesterday. Today behavior seems to be back to normal.
One also must consider that the IMF and the people associated with the IMF probably have their own agenda, and the US has unique resources at its disposal.

Makes for a good headline though, doesn't it?
> Second, I think it's rather difficult to pin much blame on regulators. The two levers used that have made this so particularly awful, CDOs and CDSs, were almost entirely over-the-counter, unregulated affairs,

As has been pointed out repeatedly, that's wrong. (I note the absence of the other two legs, namely subprime, and the bank balance sheet concentration caused by tax policy wrt fannie and freddie stock, both of which are clearly regulator caused.)

Regulators approved all use of CDOs and CDSs by banks and insurance companies. We know that because those institutions get no benefit from holding unapproved assets. (Solvency is a measure of the relationship between regulated assets and liabilities.) In the case of insurance companies, there are additional restrictions on the other side - they can't write unapproved policies.

Every part of AIG is regulated, uusually by regulators from multiple nations and they do cooperate.

Yes, I know what the fed chairman said about AIG's London office. He was dead wrong about that, which is consistent with his record of predictions over the last two years.
And OOVM was the company that produced an embedded Smalltalk that was used in systems like speakers and stuff. I had always thought that's a pretty cool piece of work.

[Lars] Bak - "If you have say, a small router or a dishwasher you can upgrade the code while it's running, no reboot is required" (http://www.smalltalk.org/versions/OOVM.html)
e1299a9c9a6db4a6eae9bcd66f18784c3b975e31
Key Takeaway : If you are really really good at what you do, companies will pay you to work out of home, writing Open Source code, from scratch, at your own pace, on your own terms.

For the rest of us there is always enterprise systems and cube farms. :-(. Yeah Ok I am just depressed at how much other programmers are better than me :-(

More seriously though, I wouldn't have thought that there is such a "market" for expertise in writing VM s. Of course you probably get to be that good by not caring how much of a "market" there is to doing the things you love.

"Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. " - PG in his essay "How to Do What You Love"
I was going to read this article but I'm too good looking/smart.
I wonder if there'll ever really be a way to mentor/help out women in tech without drawing attention to the gender statistics. I totally agree that helping others get interested when they are on the verge of being put off is a positive thing. But I still have this whole aversion to making us "special" and thus exacerbating the attitudes. Ho hum.
> Further complicating the "regulators are more to blame" approach, even if we overlook the basic contradiction at its core, are the issues of regulatory capture:

Regulatory capture is a consequence of regulation, so its effects are problems with regulation.

> CDS contracts entered into by AIG were rather larger than the entire value of the company, for example, not what I would call a "relatively small" amount

And they were hedged by contracts that were of comparable size. That's how insurance companies work.

And all of this was approved by regulators. In AIG's case, by both bank and insurance company regulators in the US and (at least) bank regulators from other countries. (I don't know if other countries also regulated AIG as an insurance company, but I suspect that they did.)

Note that the foreign banks that bought AIG policies did so with the express permission of their regulators. We know that because banks get no benefit from unregulated assets.
A utility is a business operated for a profit. Corporations will take the path of least resistance to this profit, and since hardened systems are expensive to implement and manage, and since they have mostly been entirely unnecessary (no measurable ROI), they don't get implemented.

For similar reasons, most software has only the most rudimentary security needed to maintain the appearance of security.
Disclaimer: I don't have any direct input to this question.

However, someone else might, with the help of --

http://bit.ly/jgAHI [CollectiveSys]

Jerry
The phar (php archive) feature is nice. PHP is already quite easy to deploy, this makes it even easier.
I'm not sure how making the argument that blaming regulators who created the incentives and environment for an industry to act against their long term self interest is inconsistent with being libertarian. What Wall Street did was celebrated by regulators and legislators up until the point they realized that it was a house of cards (which was after its collapse). Wall Street took the bait - for which I'm not going to deny they have some responsibility over their own destruction - and they have paid heavily financially for that pain (look at financial sector stock prices and how many actually remain), But to the original point (and the linked post):

"A free market in which participants risked their own money might work quite well, but that’s not what we tried. We had a market in which participants risked other peoples’ money and pocketed much of the upside but suffered no downside risk, all made possible by the government’s regulating away public company shareholder power."

AIG's demise has come rather late in the game. CDS's are responsible for their massive losses, however CDS's are not responsible for this crisis. There's a difference here. However what's infuriating about the response that it is overdone relative to the crisis. He wants to be able to monitor risks private firms take with their own money and that of their investors. This is a power grab - since it's not like he only wants these powers for AIG - for something akin to the rogue trading at Barings bank. AIG's collapse could have been managed. Most of the business units held by AIG are actually quite profitable not to mention highly regulated.

To put this in perspective with respect to legislation, what Geithner could have done if he wanted to have an orderly liquidation or even save AIG was to push for the suspension of mark-to-market which would have allowed AIG not to seek massive amounts of funding to meet _regulatory_ requirements. AIG was already regulated as an insurer and as a financial institutions. What Geithner wants extends far beyond preventing what happened to AIG.
Once again I couldn't read the article because it has too little information (facts, to be more accurate) per sentence and that's why I beleive HN is not the right place to post the link. Seriously, it seems like wasting time and I can smell this journalistic approach from the first sentences. Hackers don't write like that, do they?
Advertising, by its very definition, is only meant to promote a product. Just turn on your TV, you will see plenty of misleading advertising that's not really illegal.

Ignoring the fact that there are various degrees of misleading, from the mild to the outright fraudulent, are you suggesting that people have no good reason to be disgusted with it because a lot of companies do it?
They should try distcc
22 here, grad school. Though, admittedly, I made that decision about 18 months ago.
you posted this one before (only without the www.)
Well this 21 year old is enjoying a long 'vacation'. I'm immigrating to Canada so I left working as an electrician in the UK and am currently using the free time as I wait for all the papers to go through to concentrate on my writing. I currently have no financial concerns even though I haven't done a days work in over half a year, because between 17 and 20 I made so much money doing electrics that I didn't have to worry about anything. With a guaranteed job offer here in Canada I'm actually looking forward to being able to work, not for the money but to give me something to occupy the day.

My 24 year old brother just recently quit his job and is currently riding out the crisis in the UK programming for some of the community projects he likes online.
> I have not misstated what the IMF does, I have not pegged the IMF to a defined success rate

Who wrote "Who could provide better advice than an organization that routinely deals with these kinds of failures?" I'll admit to assuming that the author meant "successfully deals", but I'll be happy to retract if said author elaborates to "unsuccessfully deals" and explains why failures in unrelated situations are a qualification in ours.

> Overly aggressive or pointed responses on discussion boards do count as trolling in my book.

And if your usage was definitive, that would be enough. Feel free to use personal definitions, but if you're going to communicate with other people....

I note that you still haven't shown where I'm wrong or supported your "facts".

> I don't need to point out how exactly different aggregations of power have any useful similarity

Sure you do, because there are many tools for "aggregations of power", but the vast majority are irrelevant because of the characteristics of said tools, power, and/or aggregations.

> My central point remains valid (we need all the input we can get)

We don't need "all the input we can get". We need to avoid the irrelevant/useless because processing input has a cost.

> we are still in research mode here

If you really think that justifies any random factoid, then a list of the phone numbers from US cities would also be worthwhile.

I was sympathetic to the idea that the IMF might be useful until I started looking into it. If you think that the IMF is useful in our situation, details matter.
Ask HN: Multi-head disc drive
Hello everyone,

Does anyone know why we use disc drives that have only one reading/writing head?
This applies to any optical disc, regardless if it's CD or DVD or Blu-Ray or whatever.
Why don't they put two or three heads in each drive, so we could burn a DVD in 2 minutes? Also, I find it annoying that it takes like 10 seconds from the time you put a disc in the drive to when the computer reads it.

Maybe something like this exists and I just never heard of it? Does anyone have an idea?
On Bubbles: It looks cool indeed. Here is a short demo: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/j...

It looks better than the infamous Windows bubble notification.
Ask HN: online sales taxes?
I'm confused right now about how sales taxes are handled for online services.

For my startup, I'm building a web-app and charging a monthly fee for users. As a Canadian, I registered my corporation federally and provincially (Ontario). Now, what happens when I sell my web-app service to someone in the US? Does that count as an export? Do I have to register my business in the jurisdiction of wherever I sell (that sounds silly, but I need to know for clarity!)?

For those hackers and founders out there, what is your opinion on this issue?

As I really have no capital for my startup, I'd prefer to get advice from a lawyer as a last resort.
This blog has quickly become one of my favorites - it's a good review of the topics in TCS.
Not everyone runs Linux on his laptop. We have several Linux clusters here that are useful for schoolwork.
Mini 10 Dell Inspiron Laptop Reviews
Would be an interesting poll for HN. I'm in that same boat, I bet a lot of the readers here are too.
> These people have zero credibility on anything debt-related until they repudiate their party's economic policies under Reagan and Bush II, both periods when it should not have been necessary for the US to radically increase its debt burden.

Reagan's spending was during a recession, which is when the standard theory says that govts should go into debt. I note that the folks on the left didn't want less spending at that time - they wanted far more. And, they were in a position to cut a lot of spending and refused.

As to Bush II, the only opposition from the left to any of his spending increases (other than Iraq) was that it wasn't enough. Since debt is the difference between revenue and spending, anyone who advocates increased spending when revenues are not increasing even more is advocating increased debt.

> Lest we forget they were also a major proponent of social security reform (translation: Republican-championed efforts to invest Social Security funds directly in the stock market in ways that would generate private management fees).

Because Ghod knows that a govt worker will always do the right thing and for less.