skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Valid question and valid points. To answer it: I linked to that because it's what I use, and I use that service because for me the benefit of aggregating many references into one outweighs the downsides (which you highlight). I'm not promoting it, so I would like to think that my linking to it can fall into the category of 'diversity of opinion is beneficial to the community'.
s/down/up/
For some reason I have a bad feeling for this if it goes through. Now that this offer is over, I feel relieved.

I supposed I rather have more companies than a few big fat companies.
Yeah- Quake :) (Its actually based on an improved version of the Quake engine.)
A per-process model for Ruby doesn't have to use a fuckton of memory -- with fork() & COW, the processes could easily share.

Unfortunately Ruby has an awful mark-and-sweep garbage collector that writes to nearly every page on every collection, making COW useless.
But according to this article, employees are supposed to check for such notes (and presumably do something about them): http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2007/08/2... (see 2nd picture)
I think what you're sensing is that curious aspect of science fiction before the mid-1980s, which is the near-complete absence of computers. I say "near-complete" because computers often still showed up in some token, simple role of administration or navigation, but the general-purpose networked computer as suited to 3D-gaming as it is to wordprocessing as it is to video-conferencing with someone on the other side of the world, all of that in a device that fits in hand, with the associated social changes, is missing from sci-fi until sci-fi authors started to get a sense of just how far Moore's law was going to go.

(And I don't mean to imply that's the endpoint of electronic development either, it's just something I can definitively say that the future, that is, "now", definitively already possesses.)

Now hard sci-fi faces the other side, which is that there's no evidence that it's going to stop before completely rewriting the universe as we know it (see endtime's link to Accelerando).

Asimov lived long enough to ret-con a sort of explanation in, as I understand it ("Robots suppressed computers!", although that still preserves the weird way in which robots were invented long before computers in his universe which makes no sense at all), but the lack of computers is still shot through his fiction and all fiction of that era, with just a few fragmentary exceptions here and there.
Evolution in general clearly does not favor "low pause" sleep patterns.

Evolution does not consider every possibility. And when it does consider one, it doesn't necessary "implement" it well.
And I breath a sigh of relief!
Interesting topic. Uninteresting article. Problematic trap.
How would it be different to them posting the full url?
Yeah I'd like to see them climb in sophistication, be autonomous too; maybe make them find each other on a lumpy battlefield, via vision or something. CPU power has gotten much cheaper since the last time they were current. It was just hardware.

You (or at least I, rather) want the competition to be in brain power or behavior rather than just gimmicky hardware. It risks not being as popular but, /simulated/ robots could have unlimited hardware and computation power. If you got interesting behaviors like stalking, maybe decoying, whatever. You could at least render the fight beautifully, to make up partially for the lack of it being real. The sophistication of the hardware would be unlimited, you could have one roll up in a ball or otherwise change shape. And, that would be /some/ platform for botmaking. I think the physics models are powerful enough to model damage. Dayam, someone should do this.
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Finally an acceptable excuse for some extensive procrastination! Thank you ;)
So all that has happened is that the Internet has allowed schoolgirl gossip and yelling in bars to be broadcast on an international scope and compete with professional journalism and scientific discourse. I suppose that cannot be helped with the democratization of the media. Still, if the common man is going to have that kind of power, should we not urge everyone to use it responsibly, and to try to raise the level of discussion, especially in what is supposed to be a professional context such as software development. Of course, that is what Hacker News is attempting to do; I'm hoping it will work.
I don't really know the details of Dubai's labor situation, but aren't they also there voluntarily? I know laws are different in the Middle East, but I thought slavery was still illegal in the UAE.
The dominant species on earth (humans) sleep, the generally believed to be smartest animals sleep (humans, monkeys, dogs, various birds), the biggest (elephants, giraffes), the hunters (big cats), the hunted, herbivores, omnivores, the dominant type of fruit fly (in the article) sleeps. Even creatures that would drown if they went unconcious (dolphins, whales) have a kind of sleep.

What, exactly, has it prohibited?
http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html
http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html
http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/000932.html
Clouding the issue?

I think there are two separate issues.

1.) Amoral: clearly; they are a corporate entity, not a human being

2.) Menace: who or what are they menacing? If you feel threatened, don't use their products.
It's ludicrous for a stock brokerage with real mony at risk to pull an April Fools prank, let alone one that deals with a trader's buying power/balances. Ridiculous.

Plus, I'm sure that there's some kind of SEC rule dealing with accurate reporting of a trader's balance. I doubt they did any due diligence before pulling this.

(Or as kirse said, it could have been a bug—a very serious, untimely bug.)
not sure I understand the comparison between Paris/NY/Tokyo and Dubai...?
Adventures trying to use open-source libraries
Explain with examples?
I will be delighted if Sun survives at all.

Still, I would love even more if Sun summons the will to bring back the desktop Unix workstation. The x86 world we live in is lethally boring.
Pro's of being a specialist:
"- They are experts in their specialty.
- They know the work inside and out, upside and down."

I raised an eyebrow on the article too. The question is a good one to spark a debate here but the article was thin IMO.
The fact is if your url is public with no restrictions whatsoever than you god bad security

The goal should be to ensure people going to your site know what your real address is.
One man's experience: http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/category/polyphasi...
Jasmina Tešanović is no goddman mail-order bride. On her own, without a USian hubby, Tešanović is exactly the sort of person any healthy democratic society needs and we should welcome her with open arms. Of course, I wouldn't put it past Uncle Sam for targeting her because of her activism. Warlords have their kids and trophy wives here, naturalized and all.
Before everyone gets up in arms... how do we know this was an April Fool's joke and not an unfortunate glitch? All I'm seeing is this website calling it a joke with no real justification.

Secondly, I'd be curious to see the intraday charts for the stocks that were purchased, just to see the effect this may have had.

Thirdly, everyone knows that Zecco sucks and if you want a great social-networking broker, go with TradeKing.
I pride myself on having nearly no ethical or moral constraints, but damn, "Life is short, have an affair!" is a bit much even for me.

And considering it costs roughly $2.50 to send an email it might be cheaper in the long run to just get a divorce. Okay, maybe not...
I was really looking forward to seeing the content of this comprehensive guide having just gone through a GIS 0-60 myself last year.

That guide is horrible! It might contain some good content in there, but it is ridiculously wordy. It takes them about 3-4 paragraphs of dry useless fluff to get in anything useful.

There may be some gems in there, but I cannot imagine reading it cover-to-cover.

Too bad, since this subject lacks a good entry-level guide to give you a 30000-ft view of the domain.
So who is more likely to be a thriving independent business in 5 years, Yahoo or Sun? And which group of share holders will be more pissed off that the deal didn't go through?

I'm going to bet Yahoo will still be around and Sun's shareholders will be more angry.
You can't bash Ruby because you wrote shitty code in Ruby.

If by "bashing" you mean claiming that Ruby was less suitable than Scala, why not? When a language isn't suitable for a particular application, that manifests as shitty code. Needing a bunch of hand-coded runtime type checks to prevent new bugs from creeping into the code suggests that a statically typed language would be more appropriate.

Of course, an infinitely intelligent programmer could have written Twitter in assembly, Brainfuck, or even C. There exists a positive integer N such that Ruby would have worked if all the Twitter developers had IQ >= N. (Please, nobody think too hard about that statement. I'm just making a point.)

So maybe they were just too stupid to use Ruby. But in that case, they were right to switch to another language, and they were right to report that Scala helped them succeed where they failed with Ruby.
I think that they should each use their private SSL keys to double-sign a document stating that they're married.
Ha. You're kind of outing yourself as a white male with statements like that. I daresay blacks or women would be none too eager to join you in your idyllic 1800s paradise. There is something to be said for the simple life on the land, though for me I'll keep my A380s, internet and penicillin, thanks.

I like your point about "be careful what you wish for". America was certainly left holding the bag all right, and perhaps it took a long time to sink in the reasons that the Europeans had been so eager to hand it over. Truth is, no one country should be holding that bag, which is why a proper UN (not necessarily the UN we have today) is so desirable and inevitable. Hopefully the USA, realising that playing the role of global policeman is not the fun career it envisaged in its youth, will come to realise that a supranational pseudo-government is actually a very good idea. I predict this "realisation" will occur right about the time China overtakes the USA as the world's pre-eminent nation, in perhaps 20 or 30 years' time.

Well, like I said, the Iraq question is a very, very dead horse by now. The American opinion might have something to do with WMDs and UN Resolutions and what not, but the rest of the world has pretty much decided Iraq was pretty much just a 9/11 scapegoat and would never have been attacked absent the WTC incident. Argue if you want but there's not much point - I was explaining a sentiment, not trying to defend it. Anyway my own country was right there beside you, so not like I can point fingers. Folly on your part was also folly on my part. Ah well. Lessons learnt, hopefully.

Well, regarding the world stage - I don't think France or Australia are the peers you're looking for. France is 1/5th the size of the USA and Australia, 1/15th the size! Not really on the same level.

America's natural peers are the EU, India, China, ASEAN, CAFTA, CIS, and other blocs. America, too, will subsume into a bloc (NAFTA or successor), in time. I really see this process as inevitable. Hopefully we'll arrive fairly soon at a point where we have 10 or so major blocs sitting around a table, almost like elected officials representing their electorate, and they can duke out this kind of stuff with real authority and the power to back up their words. Not there yet, but it's a hope.

One more thing - don't bank on China's political system collapsing anytime soon. It won't. It's not even that bad, really. Communism is practically gone and if anything the country as everyday people experience it is now even more capitalist than America. They have even been experimenting with local elections, though not called by that name. Give them a few more years and I wouldn't have any problem living in China. It's a toss-up even today, honestly.
Because we're currently the smartest animal, you suggest we couldn't be better if sleep were not required?
Ask HN: Choosing a college
I'm a high school senior, and I can't see myself doing anything but technological entrepreneurship (although not necessarily software) for a career, initially anyways. I applied to the usual suspects in the fall, but was rejected from all the colleges that both seemed like good fits and offered good financial aid. (Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and Princeton) I thought my application was strong (2400 SAT, A average, placed in top ~50 of my grade nationwide in math competitions, strong history of programming projects, et al), but even Rice waitlisted me. Anyways, that’s irrelevant now, although I’m still curious as to what might have sunk me at those places.

Now, I’m trying to figure out what to do with myself for next year. I know that I want an atmosphere of smart, driven, people (for both rub-off effect and cofounder potential) and professors I can both learn from and do good work with. The problem is that there’s no place I’ve been accepted to that offers all that and an affordable price. My options seem to be as follows:

-Get into Yale off the waitlist: Seems like the ideal outcome, considering their financial aid and overall atmosphere; the main drawback seems to be the lack of engineering focus, although I get the impression there’ll be plenty of technical things there to keep me occupied and more.

-Cornell (Engineering): Everything’s good, except that my family can’t afford to pay for Cornell with the aid package they’ve sent us. Some negotiation may help, but most likely, the only real option will be to try to secure a guaranteed transfer after a year at Tufts and graduate in two years with AP and Tufts credits.

-Tufts: Tufts is tuition-free for me thanks to my mother working there, but the atmosphere there strikes me as a bit indolent and even less technically focused than Yale, although the students seem talented enough. On the positive side, Tufts is close to Boston, and I could work on research somewhere in Cambridge if I didn't find what I needed at Tufts. A downside would be continuing to be the “too-intense guy” I come off as at my high school, and potentially continuing to feel slowed down by my peers.

-McGill: This strikes me as a not particularly good option, unless someone has something positive to say. It’s more than affordable, though.

-UMass Amherst: Possible full ride scholarship. That summarizes the pluses, as far as I can tell.

So I guess the more general question amounts to: Is it worth paying large sums of money for me as a budding entrepreneur to be around smart, like-minded students for my college years?

(Sorry for the novel, but I feel that the HN community is the best place to get solid advice from those who have been through my current situation, and I needed to get the situation across)

Thanks for the help.
I would like to register my strongest possible endorsement of the article's mention of Iain M. Bank's Culture series. Since discovering them a few years ago, I have basically been obsessed with them, to the point of sort-of beginning to believe that the greatest possible mission in life is to work towards bringing about the soonest possible advent of a Culture-type society, any enabling technology, any small step.
This has all the markings of a good class-action suit. Zecco betrayed their duty of accurate account reporting (whether intentional as a 4/1 gag or unintentionally as a bug), and their customers acted on that information - to their harm. Am I missing anything here? I have a Zecco account (that I've never really used). I wonder if I'd be included in any class-action.
IMHO, putting aside all technological and specific market considerations - now just seems a terrible time for any company to sell itself, if it can afford to do otherwise.

I honestly think even if Sun can just stay in limbo for another 5 years they are going to be able to sell themselves for far more when we are not in the throes of an economic meltdown than they can right now.
I'm going to completely ignore the ethical and moral questions this services raises, and instead focus on this:

Don, a 52-year-old IT specialist living in Southern California who, not surprisingly, preferred not to give his real last name, is one of the site's hundreds of users.

I'm hoping this guy didn't give his real first name, either. Southern CA has millions of people, but I bet there are less than 10 who fit that description exactly. Hell, there might only be one.
I guess the problem is my question is inherently murky. I was speaking with the assumption that specialization implies greater difficulty, greater practice, greater determination, and in effect, demands greater smarts.

"Generalist" is being thrown around loosely here. A really good generalist is probably a specialist in being general. In other words, a good specialist goes really, really deep, but a good generalist goes really, really broad. Both are very difficult, and after this discussion, I think a majority of programmers won't fall into either, even if they think they do.
So Now Everything Is Google’s Fault
Buying extra RAM from Apple is for the birds, really. You can buy third party RAM for cheaper and install it yourself, no problem.
Did you apply to Babson? 2400 SAT = baller, props

My friend runs a great site for high schoolers going through the college admissions process. I'd suggest checking it out: zinch.com

Congrats on your acceptances, McGill is a great school, too
No, it really is downtime. When you go to an openID site, you shell into your server, run this program, authenticate at the site, then stop the service. 99.999% downtime.
While I agree that Radiohead makes money from all the publicity of their DRM free stance, I don't really think they are losing money by giving it away.

Radiohead's net profit has been estimated to be between $6 and $8 a cd downloaded. Most bands only make around $2 an album. Digital downloads earn an artist even less. And usually major labels are in charge of an album's production, but take the cost out of the artist's gross. Basically artists can sometimes pay more of the costs of cd production than the label does. So I doubt Radiohead would have made more money from downloads if they had used a label.

And as you mentioned, there are the benefits from the press and popularity. Also, Radiohead has a database of their fans who were willing to download the album. That has to be valuable to them to.

Artists Royalties: http://www.ascap.com/jam/read_about/mm_artist.html

The problem with recording contracts (info is somewhat dated):http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
People still get emotional over primitive tools. Having an emotional stake in the tool must have conveyed some evolutionary advantage as we all display it.
Miserable? It had the opposition effect on me. I found it inspiring. What a fantastic future if we can develop that sort of technology. Of course a novel has to have a few things go wrong to make a compelling story but I don't see them as being inherent in the possibilities being presented.
Is "junk DNA" essential for evolution?
He somehow failed to notice that J.K. Rowling doesn't produce anything either, she just takes the alphabet that someone else produced, takes the letters from it and arranges them in different ways. Bah!
Actually I think what you are saying is simply that smart people who enter CS from tangential fields will still do well. Their competence will probably manifest itself regardless of what field they came from. The striking thing is when you say "English and Philosophy are far older disciplines than Computer Science; consequently their methods of teaching students how to represent ideas are far more developed."

This seems to make sense. But these disciplines, although old and established, have spread across (diffused, if you will) a larger area, such that they become umbrella terms for many other studies which may not be specifically concerned with the formulation of ideas, and even less so in a quantitative and procedural manner.

Thus it is still not entirely clear whether these older disciplines deserve credit for providing better training in representing ideas than straight-up CS.
Those guys really must enjoy sleeping soundly at night. At best they're taking money from people for dreaming of better partners. At worse they're actually helping people screw each other over.

Along these same lines, we can have sites for people who want to cheat on exams, cheat on taxes. Maybe we could even have sites where people could plot crimes together -- anonymously, of course.
All this over 5 cents?
The point of the SAT in the first place was to increase diversity. Back then, it meant smart kids who weren't part of the establishment. Now, they want to get rid of it to increase diversity. Except, now it means stupid kids who aren't part of the establishment. The only group that remains the same are the losers, and that's the whole point.
Facebook friend helps avert suicide from 3,000 miles away
I don't know if anyone else has played Zone of the Enders: The Fist of Mars, but I remember getting quite caught up in that game's story. It was as much an interactive novel as it was a story-drive game, although I was much younger when I played through it and my opinion of it may be drastically different if I play it again.

The thing is, though, there are probably non-zero-sum markets both for the "interactive novel" type game and the story-less twitch shooters. It just takes a different person or mood to appreciate the genre in question.
100% effective uptime, with 99.9..% actual downtime.
Yeah. One thing I'd like to add is I'm all for a good discussion on this topic. However, I really dislike the way blog articles, specifically their headlines, are always being written with this "1 vs 0 -- CAGE MATCH!" style. It often turns what ought to be a discussion into a debate. There's a big difference. One of them is rational and inspires a healthy assessment of both angles, while the other suggests you ought to pick a side. 0.02c
An oldie but a great speech (old HN discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=211832). For anyone who's interested, here are some other extraordinary commencement speeches:

Steve Jobs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

Bill Watterson: http://home3.inet.tele.dk/stadil/spe_kc.htm

David Foster Wallace: http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html

There is a lot of good advice and numerous great sound-bytes from all of these; but one of my personal favorites comes from Bill Watterson, who makes a point that I feel often gets overlooked at HN in our relentless pursuit of success:

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential ― as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.

To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.