skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
at least that which needs stuff.
Read this article, which I just found:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-01-28/news/what-cooked-the-...

An excerpt:

About $2 trillion in credit derivatives in 1989 jumped to $8 trillion in 1994 and skyrocketed to $100 trillion in 2002. Last year, the Bank for International Settlements, a consortium of the world's central banks based in Basel (the Fed chair, Ben Bernanke, sits on its board), reported the gross value of these commitments at $596 trillion. Some are due, and some will mature soon. Typically, they involve contracts of five years or less...

Warren Buffett branded derivatives the "financial weapons of mass destruction." Felix Rohatyn, the investment banker who organized the bailout of New York a generation ago, called them "financial hydrogen bombs."

If, in an old issue of Superman, Lex Luthor had plotted to issue six hundred trillion dollars worth of baseless assets -- an amount approximately equal to the economic output of the entire world for an entire decade [1] -- and stir them together with the world's actual assets, everyone would have agreed that it was over the top. Who could believe that the planet would fall for an outrageous plot like that, even in a comic book?

So, yeah. It seems reasonable to suggest that this behavior is, to first order, essentially evil. [2]

---

[1] Global GDP in 2008: $70.65 trillion US dollars. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy)

[2] This phrase is one of my favorites. I've borrowed it from a colloquium speaker at the Cornell physics department, who used it to refer to Edward Teller. I don't remember if Hans Bethe (Teller's former colleague on the Manhattan Project, later turned arms-control advocate) was in the audience at the time, or whether he laughed. My seat wasn't that good.
I only (tried) to use lighttpd for a couple weeks. I got so frustrated with the crap config file which I could never get to do what I wanted and whose docs did not match reality I gave up and tried the at the time new competitor. Never looked back.

Many internet years latter I believe the momentum has shifted to nginx (http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/01/16/january_2009_we...) and it has so much going for it, check out the modules and add ons http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxModules

But if you really care http://www.google.com/search?q=lighttpd vs nginx
I think the YC Motto is changing to "Make something others need, and will likely pay for". I have noticed a real nice improvement in the kind of companies being funded. In other words from Good to Great concepts.
Some people (often the most vocal) just hate change. Being beholden to these customers, who will hate anything you change regardless of quality, is a surefire way to fail in the long run.

( p.s. how you been? :) )
Really though, this is such a simple attack you'd think that it would be protected against. Any argument about "trust" is irrelevant due to the frustratingly simple way this system has been gamed. Usernames, that's it? I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner.
...is Phusion essentially just a slightly better FastCGI?

Well, it depends on whether you're looking at it from an academic or practical standpoint. AFAIK the technologies are not entirely dissimilar, as you suggest, but there are notable differences once you actually put them into use. I've used both for running rails apps, and a few things stand out for me:

1. Passenger is much easier to set up: it took me about 5 minutes to get my first Passenger based rails app up and running. The last time I set up a rails app w/FastCGI (admittedly a few years ago now) it took me much longer. This comes down to simpler configuration combined with better documentation. Subsequent application deployment is also easier (no manual server restarts required). This is worth a lot in practical terms, even if not flashy.

2. Passenger seems more stable. I never had quite the problems with FastCGI that others appear to have had, and I've only been using Passenger for a few weeks now, but there's a reason people used FastCGI less often once Mongrel became available.

3. Oh, and there's some neat stuff too: automatic spawning and pruning of application instances in response to demand, etc.
Brilliant Scientific Screw-ups
Honestly, what have you lost? Nothing. The truth is that you shouldn't be trusting a bunch of people you've never met ANYWAY. Nobody's asking you to give them your address or mother's maiden name, but you wouldn't give those out if asked by a fellow member anyway. You should always be wary of sites asking for your information for whatever reason, and just because you trust some of the people on HN doesn't mean there aren't tons more on here that could possibly deceive you.

People seem to react to this like like the record companies reacted to Napster. "OH NO! IT'LL KILL US ALL! Screw changing our ancient business model, we'll just SUE 'EM!"

Instead of updating the way you think about HN (and other sites) you choose to put down the person who enlightened you and cast him out as some sort of heretic.

Hackers INVENT, hackers BREAK STUFF, and hackers BRING OUT THE UGLY! Why is Xach getting martyred for being a real hacker?

Besides, he's giving HN huge publicity. Jeff Atwood twittered about this thread.
Well, according to wikipedia, in which metahumor redirects to meta-joke:

Meta-joke refers to three somewhat different, but related categories: "self-referential jokes", "jokes about jokes" (see meta-) also known as metahumor, and "joke templates".

Recursive humor would be a subclass of self-referential jokes, going by the definition for self-referential jokes as given by (what else?) Wikipedia.

This kind of meta-joke is a joke in which the joke itself, or rather a familiar class of jokes, is part of the joke.
Exactly. I didn't think it was clear enough on the front page why you would choose this over any other monitoring solution.
"I thought it was a scam": NH woman sued by RIAA
FastCGI for no particular reason other than it's worked for me straight off using a couple different Python versions and Django.

I also use nginx as proxy in front of apache and dev instances of django manage.py runserver (nginx serves up static, passes dynamic on to back ends)

Nginx is so powerful, flexible, and has never given me a single problem. I loves it.
You can do this to any sentence fragment. "Eleanor Rigby was lonely [1], like many others." Fuckin' Beatles.

It sure does help to have the ideas to back up the style, though.

[1] (Here I should mention a habit of hers I had long noticed but never commented on, which habit was that she would walk through churches after weddings, employing her falcate digits to retrieve the spent grains of the matrimonial offering.)
We have a bunch of interesting distributed computing problems we are solving in the pipe, so stay tuned. Nothing out of the box yet...

Currently, we have a pretty unique graphing framework. Basically, you can plot any bit of data and send it back to the server, but the limitation is you have to launch the server through us. The feature will be added soon as available to anyone with a cloud server.
Fundamental problems with the Common Lisp language
On the other hand, there's a guy like patio11, whose every comment gets something like a hundred upvotes

I should really write an e-book about this and make $400,000 selling it through Twitter to startups in Silicon Valley. I can see the sales letter now: How I Made 3,000 Karma in 100 Days!

Seriously, though -- I'm flattered that folks think that bits and pieces of what I write is good, but I think that probably 80% of it is chaff and most of the remainder is merely acceptable.
I don't think of it that way and I'm sure they don't either. You can't have the same company doing both seed and series A investments.
Dell Adamo - Thinnest Laptop Alive
That was fun, but... a clan culture as a better way for modern society? :-)

I thought a clan society was by definition made up of organized special interest groups?

Just consider hiring someone at a company that wasn't from your clan, when your clan eldest/boss tell you that your idiot cousin needs a job. :-)

The article formalized things for me I've always wondered about. But it reminds me a bit of the laments during the dying of the Roman empire. Everyone saw the problems but couldn't solve them.

Is there any work on how to organize a society which avoids special interest groups? Or, at least, keeps the light on them?
Your assumption here isn't crazy, but it depends on the browser, and you shouldn't rely on it.
Where do you work, erlanger? Let's have a look.
Did your instances suffer as a result of this downtime? I've been playing around with Scalr, haven't really seen any problems as of late... Would love more input from others who have used / are using the service.
I would not give the refactoring recommendation you suggest. I would make both Account and Customer 'Displayable' and 'Persistable' ( still thinking in Java :( ). Then implement a kind of Strategy pattern to take a Displayable object. Same goes for Persistable.

That way you can focus on the domain objects as data, and how they are related to each other. You can also come up with cleaner (and more orthogonal) patterns of how to display, persist, or otherwise handle that data.
I agree. If cloud monitoring charts as a service is their niche, say so. I'll keep checking back, and I'l buy once its further along.
No, they just didn't scale during the outage. I do recommend Scalr, its great, but I also tell people that its bleeding edge.
My comments on the release of lighttpd 1.4.20 speak to this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=319301

In brief, nginx is a glorious piece of software. Despite a strong early showing in 2006-2007, lighttpd isn't.
That was my point. Once they've adjusted they become fanatic, because Facebook rarely launches bad features.
That's the cruft I'm speaking of. The courts are almost slaves to precedent, no matter how bogus that precedent might be. Every time some high-moneyed legal team rams through some bogus bit of jargon, it appends itself verbatim to all of the contracts after that, almost like a macro, or worse, a virus.

Like our own dna, over the years the simple genomes get loaded down with crap that has nothing whatsoever to do with the creature but replicates nonetheless.
If I have to launch the instance with you, that pretty much makes using it for compute clusters impossible. One launches those from a script at the shell.
But the "private" Twitter account doesn't offer as much flexibility as Facebook's multilayered options. Does it? Can you change specific tweets to fit for specific groups of people? (I don't have an account anymore so I don't know.)
A very good, and important, point. Several VCs have told me that they hate the pain the comes with dealing with many seed/angel investors out there; YCombinator has sort of established itself as the premier seed brand, and one that eliminates the old problems with seed/angel while adding a ton of new benefits. I suppose this could be a great symbiotic relationship, rather than a "potential future synergy" (in corporate speak).

I'm still unsure why Sequoia was brought in if they really aren't getting any preferential treatment, as I think this would be off-putting to other VCs out there -- especially with such a small funding round, which I am sure could have been raised without creating any conflict of interest, be it real or perceived. You're a smart guy, so I am sure you had your reasons (access to their administrative infrastructure / easier pipeline for having YC startups acqu-hired by larger Sequoia-backed companies, perhaps?); you may not want to disclose them, however, and I respect that.
From the article:

"I heard amputees say they sometimes didn't wear a prosthetic hand at all, because what they feared when they did wear one - one that was a very good disguise - was that moment when the people they were speaking to for the first time realized that it was artificial. Some of them said they'd actually like to get that moment over and done with at the very beginning, and would welcome a hand that was obviously not a human hand, but had other good qualities."

I wonder if Pullin was referring to the repulsion that humans can feel towards something as it approaches a more humanistic state. This is otherwise known as the Uncanny Valley hypothesis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

His assertion towards eyeglasses shortly after seems to reinforce this fact. (edit: sorry, not fact - concept)

I'd be keen to see how people's reactions to prosthetics would change if the need to have them look human-like was removed. Get some top industrial design talent onto it... perhaps see if someone can convince some design guys from Apple to do some pro-bono designs.
Clojure 1, PHP 0
This is why I don't like "NULL"
English associativity sucks.
The US economy and credit crisis explained by Peter Schiff (2006)
If it works anything in American companies like it does in German companies (I'm an American that moved to Germany on the equivalent of a H1-B), they decide who they want to hire, take their résumé, inverse it to submit an application for exactly that. I don't think there's another human on the planet that would have fit for the qualifications that they submitted for my residence permits.

My last one included literally every programming language that I'm good at, being a native English speaker, having a background as a music teacher (it was a pro-audio company, so that wasn't a real stretch) and most of the skills that I'd picked up along the way, regardless of if they were relevant to the job I was taking.

Fortunately, the German system doesn't have the no-job-switching provision, in the 6 years I waited to get permanent residence I was able to have two different jobs. You do however run the risk when switching that your visa won't be renewed for the next job.
Which one would you start by, then? You have to at least order them in some way to discard them one by one.
Ola Bini has some really amazingly insightful comments sometimes...this is definitely one of those times.

Understanding Bottom Types from a functional perspective really helps to understand the danger with NULL in other languages. Also, this is one of those times where I can see "pure" CS informing "practical" CS.
weird, the edit seems to have been messed up somehow... what it should look like (if it doesn't make sense) is.

----

EDIT - sidenote. I've been asked and emailed by several people if I could spearhead another campaign to do the same thing for Woz that we did for Rick. Autovoting on a very large scale. To be honest, we proved that it was possible, we showed that online voting was inherently flawed and really...once was enough.

Besides, Woz has said he wouldn't want to win that way so we really should respect his wishes.
Benchmarks that are not completely anecdotal are really hard to produce. For starters you need the following...

1. Don't run the client on the same server. If you do, you have no business trying to test for high concurrency. Isolate the variables.

2. Size of file you are serving. Are you close to saturating your connection between the client and server? Most of the time this is the case.

3. Concurrency is hard to test because most of the time the client is the problem in the test. Don't use apache bench for anything like this as it's high concurrency is much to be desired.

4. A lot of other details need to be compared to make a benchmark useful. Are you using keepalives on both/or not. Nginx workers/processes vs apache threads/clients. Are you comparing apples to apples? How's your TCPIP backlog in a case like this? What kind of IO model are you running on each? Are you using sendfile on both or only one?

Nginx is a great server, and probably a better choice for static files, but data like this is like saying, "the other day I saw a some kind of Honda pass some kind of Nissan". No useful information to infer about either.
FTA: "Japan’s history is mined for evidence supporting Olson’s theory."

This is why economics is not yet a respectable science. I can't say that I disagree with the analysis presented in the article, but that says nothing at all about its truth value. Unfortunately, many of the arguments presented by economists, including theories that are diametrically opposed to one another, seem quite plausible and that is precisely the problem with economics as a discipline. The standard of proof is still stuck in the dark ages.
I don't know you just said, but sign me up!
Obama: $15B for Small Businesses
You don't think there are any other options besides hermitage or ubiquitous sharing of personal life and thoughts?

Anyways, obviously I'm not against others being open about themselves like you recommend. Even if what I say is right that doesn't exclude your point about the kind of person you want to work for. People just may not find the reticent lifestyle is for them. However, there are people in this world who are comfortable with keeping to themselves, and they may have more opportunities in the future.
I hate wires.
Mancur Olson: How rich countries die
With a good dose of existential depression, you may realize that this is as good as any other pursuit.
> none of us will give out our usernames to external websites

Maybe so, but in the case of Twitter, not many people seemed to learn their lessons - and there people were giving away their usernames and passwords.

> decide between emailing someone hoping they fix the problem, or just fixing it

But you do not know if a vendor will fix the problem as soon as you report it to them, even if they already have a past history of not caring. the balance here is responsible disclosure: maybe it's a big enough issue or maybe the right person noticed that your problem will get fixed when you first let them know..in the event you feel you are ignored though, go public. best of both worlds.

> I found this whole event funny.

I don't think it's funny or angering. It's probably educational, as more people learn what CSRF is and it's probably a little annoying in that not as many people are discussing responsible disclosure, but there's not much to get angry about. Votes? big deal....
http://aviary.com/terms

actual term of service link.
Keep in mind the Bay Area has an artificial housing shortage. Palo Alto is zoned as agricultural land, despite having no real agriculture.
So Obama is encouraging small businesses to take on debt, and increasing the extent to which taxpayers are accountable if the business fails!

This is a very narrow policy that will not help most small businesses, particularly not most tech startups, etc. Most of us either bootstrap or take VC funding -- neither of which have any hope of taxpayer bailout!

This makes a great headline for Obama but is not doing anything for the valley.
I have about 15 that I keep coming back to. Most deal with boring business requirements: charting (I use two different variants of Ruby wrappers for the Google Charts API, plus OpenFlashChart 2), data entry, parsing, etc. I have no clue where they're hosted since I use Google as my own personal link memory service.
apache w/modphp has the best latency in comparison to any fastcgi setup. When it comes to high concurrency latency and time to finish is your biggest issue. Slow clients are another killer (slow clients are users who have a slow connection and take an order of magnitude longer or more do download the page data as compared to generation).
If you application is fast (less than 20ms) page generation your best bet is the following setup...

nginx or varnish reverse proxy front end. (depending on your load you can turn keepalives on here) This front end isolates your www/php/db from slow clients making sure that your request gets processed fast, resources are released, and then a light process of your proxy handles the delivery of the data. On the back end use apache/mod_php with a limit of only 50-100 clients.
(not that I think any of us would actually want a handout!)
There is little flaw in the essay - it has forgotten about humans and human nature e.g. I am very young I go out to play - on rainy days and when my friends are away I watch kids TV (available pretty much all day)...Time moves on...I am a young care-free teen and I have face-book, computers, etc. and rip-off music and video and watch TV on the Internet, I have social networking and on-line games and have XBox and PS3 and Wii all over the place....Then reality dawns slowly but surely...I am a young adult and I have to get a job because Dad lost all his money in the recession and he wont give me endless bundles of cash anymore or cover my bills...I use the WWW to find one...If I am lucky (having studied and not "googled off" at school) I get one and I have to work hard BUT I suddenly have MY OWN money and I enjoy that and I go out, join the tennis club, local gym, go to bars and clubs...Lo and behold I find a soulmate and after much vexing (or not) we move in together..I work; she works, we get home and we cook and boy are we tired and we cannot be bothered to fire up the computer and go to Face-book, Google, Find, Search, Look, Hunt on the WWW (anyhow did that in the office)... What a long day its been; We sit down in the living room and switch on the TV and RELAX...
Opera 10 Featuring Turbo Acceleration Technology
Opera is all set to become the worlds fastest web-browser with its server-side acceleration technology to be included in upcoming Opera 10 release, the Opera team released the first public alpha of Opera Turbo demonstrating the compression technology meant for users on low-bandwidth connections, working similar to the man-in-the-middle proxy compression system used by commercial software's like ONSPEED Web Accelerator, Opera Turbo compresses network traffic providing significant improvements in browsing speeds consuming less data saving bandwidth bills.
I think a major breakthrough will occur when we ditch the whole "meaning" thing. I think humans probably use language the same way a computer uses numbers, i.e. manipulation of abstract symbols.
Words, like numbers, are ultimately just empty buckets with a bunch of tags attached that tell us something about how it interacts with the world. Our tagging system is very complex, and I suspect that much of human creativity stems from experimentally assigning inappropriate tags to concepts and seeing if the result makes a more coherent pattern.
Yes, completely different.

Proof by contradiction means that you start by assuming the opposite of what you wish to prove, and then logically arriving at a contradiction. The existence of a contradiction implies that your premises were false, and since your premise was the opposite of what you wanted to prove, what you wished to prove must be true.

Proof by induction works by showing that a particular case (usually the first/smallest case) is true, and then showing that the fact that one case is true implies that the next case is also true. In other words, prove that your statement is true for n=1, and then prove that if the statement is true for m, it is also true for m+1. Since it's true for n=1, that implies it's true for n+1=2, and since it's true for n=2, that implies it's true for n+1=3, and so on, and thus you have proven that it's true for all n larger than your original case. Of course, it doesn't have to be that n implies n+1 -- it can be n-1, or any other variant, the point is that it chains up and leads to all values being proven.