skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, you are making my point. What happens in these cases? What happens, say, when a merchant from Venice seeks to work with an Arab trader in the 14th century?

Each voluntarily gives up some sovereignty to create a minimal set of rules so that a transaction can take place.

Government (at whatever level) consists of each of us voluntarily giving up some of our sovereignty so that we can have private property and contract law. The protection of our property -- our lives, our housing, our money, etc -- is the goal here. Without that protection, and without our voluntary surrender of power, government becomes something you do to somebody else. It becomes a tool of control. Jefferson was against the U.S. Constitution, for instance, for just that fear -- that by removing politicians from the people at some point you lose the heart of a democracy.

Now of course we have to have a national defense, and therefore we're going to have taxes. I don't think anybody wants zero government. In fact, government can do lots of cool things, like a space program or promote clean energy. But the key question remains: are people voluntarily giving up sovereignty for freedom to transact? Or are they stuck with no choices? Is government something for maximizing freedoms, or something for equalizing property? Are we still getting equal representation for our taxation? Is government something we create, or something that we're stuck with?

If property is a privilege to be taken at the whims of the majority, then we're back to the caves again.
Be great for finding those lost keys and the techonology theme could also prove more economical than e-paper etc.
You should probably have linked to the guy who wrote the software.

http://nullstyle.com/2007/5/9/erlectricity-hi-ruby-i-m-erlan...
Does anyone know of any good Erlang resources?
I recently became interested in the subject, and am having a really tough time finding any information.

Thanks in advance!
HN content is just as much a joke as any other "news" site. Just pump it through a reader and quit wasting time on their erlang flooded homepage.
You need to clarify...do you mean angel investors or incubators like YC. Because it doesn't sound like an incubator would work for you.
I don't get it. Don't we have Hacker News for this already?
Multiplicity of Dog Breeds Helps Domestication
I had no idea what Erlang was until a few minutes ago.
At this rate I might soon be an expert. naa, feed me more Erlang.
Or with some context: 'My analysis doesn't prove [something I never claimed] but Hauser's Law doesn't prove the opposite [which Hauser and Ranson did claim].'

In other words, on the growth effects of raising top tax rates he is indeed inconclusive. But on the question of whether Hauser is full of crap, he's pretty conclusive.
The author notes that Erlang is "Yet Another Programming Language." Well not surprisingly, this is "Yet Another NN Article."
Don't Tag My Cow
If you're having such a hard time keeping up with the traffic, why not offload the burden of the site to some community members?

Or what about throwing HN up on EC2?
Plaxo - Ercan Turksoy
While I can't argue with the premise, I think calling this moment a turning point in the site's viability is a bit presumptuous and sensationalist.

Reality check: It's incredibly hard, if not impossible, to build real communities online. People just don't have a true stake in it. There's no chance of bumping into that other person at the local coffee shop. No concerns about having to actually work together with someone they dislike. No real coexistence or cooperation. These limitations cut both ways.

The naive response is to boot individuals that don't "fit in." That leads to the problems mentioned in the article. An alternative response is to erect hurdles that restrict access only to those deemed worthy. This has a deleterious effect on external perception and fosters an internal sense of elitism.

But seeing people advocate for these solutions isn't a sign of the end, it's the natural and inevitable response to concerns of growth and change.

This happens in the real world, too. Look at home owners' associations, community covenants, and gated subdivisions. Each an attempt to create a tangible (financial) stake for members, provide recourse in case someone doesn't fit in, and limit who can enter in the first place. These aren't bad in and of themselves, but only rarely do they help produce a true community.

I don't know how to address these issues. The real world examples, where much more is at stake, lead me to believe that there may not be a clear cut solution. But we can't survive by closing our borders. In the long run, the isolation would hurt us far more than a disruptive Outsider. Instead, we need to find ways to actually engage the folks that stumble into our fold.
Harney & Sons Guide to Tea
Perhaps not the response you are looking for, but if you get into YC you are only required to be in the Valley for 3 months.

Is that an issue for many people, especially married individuals?

Every incubator I have heard of requires your physical presence. A short period of time like that seems to be an easy thing to sell to your significant other.
cryptography@metzdowd.com isn't bad, although not much of the traffic is about crypto.
IRC channel has added this to the topic:

The police have been called and gone to what we have verified to be tony's address

Seems like all that is left is to wait and pray.
Please fix all the lame erlang
Thank You
If you're keen, you can get the source code and take a look: http://www.arclanguage.com/install

File system stores aren't that uncommon (aside from the VSAM days, even in RDBMS times+) - it's a common approach for Wiki implementations too.
I dont understand why you would call this a business that doesnt have much meaning. Hes basically a more modern version of newspapers, and magazines. They hire editors, and content producers, pick topics of interest, and make money off of advertising.

So from my perspective hes just a smaller scale Rupert Murdoch.
I'd have thought that most of HN's traffic is on the front page, and it's associated comments. I could well be wrong - But given this I'd have thought 2GB was plenty, and wasn't the bottleneck.
You're quite right. My analysis was simplistic and naive.
I agree that it's not possible to calculate an economy. I was talking on a personal level, a rational person in a situation where at any time they may lose their job and be thrown on the streets will save and put aside enough money to survive for a reasonable amount of time. However if you're already living hand to mouth, you lose your job, the bank forecloses on your house and you're out on the street, well it seems in the US it's tent city here I come. Many of the people are victims of an economic event out of everyones control. A social security safety net would prevent tent cities from happening. Which is the greatest cost to a society - having citizens living in tents without any sanitation or health care, which will increase crime and health care needs - or provide all citizens with a safety net of a subsistence wage?
It's a different world now. I can't just grab my shit and move west a few hundred miles to get away from this government, or go find a new continent and establish a new country with the rules I like. The world isn't that big anymore. Consent to being governed is no longer an option. We will be governed whether we like it or not.

You can only look back in history so far before you see the world was so vastly different that comparisons aren't valid anymore. Government is already something past generations has done to us and there's no going back, it's already a tool of control, Jefferson already lost.

> But the key question remains: are people voluntarily giving up sovereignty for freedom to transact? Or are they stuck with no choices?

The question does not remain, we've been stuck with no choices for decades if not generations. No natural born citizen alive today joined the U.S. voluntarily, we were all born stuck with it.

It's not if property is a privilege, property is a privilege, period. The government can seize it, destroy it through inflation, or whatever else we let them do and they've been doing it for a long long time.

Your arguments are all so academic and what if'y, man I'm talking about reality here. The government can seize your property for suspicion of drugs, lose the case, and keep your property. They can seize the ultimate personal property, your own body, and imprison you because of what you chose to put into your own body. That's life in this country.

This idea that government is some voluntary agreement between the government and the governed just isn't the real world anymore, the days of overthrowing the government are long gone. You're talking about what government should be, I'm talking about what it is, so what's your point again?
Hire YC: Need high-traffic Django help ASAP
hey,

we just re-launched out site w/ Django, and are cant handle the peak traffic load. we have apache in the back (mod_python), nginx in the front, memcached. the database doesn't seem to be the bottleneck.

restarting apache yields fast response times up front, but gradually drifts to about 6-12 seconds per request.

we can't handle getting crushed with unacceptable load times much more without serious consequences, so if anyone is available to help, email me at `mattdennewitz at gmail` and lets talk.
Ask HN: Hacker Tent City
So, we are seeing that regular people beat us hackers to tent cities. Where would the perfect place be for a hacker tent city?

Someone else mentioned using cargo containers instead of tents with YContainer funding them.
How the 2600 forged the home video game future
I think having a room full of med students network boot their random vendor laptops will take about as long, and succeed about as well, as asking a room full of computer nerds to draw a pint of blood from themselves.
ErlyWeb: The Erlang Twist on Web Frameworks
I never said anything about forcing people into shelters. My point was by providing a basic level of social security the tent city could be avoided. In Australia there are still some homeless living under bridges and so on, this can't be prevented, but we have no tent cities (except for the occasional political protests).

There are some shelters run by charity groups for the remaining homeless, who provide food and shelter for the night if so required. Most of these people have mental disorders / drug problems / or homeless kids who've left home, and there are mechanisms that help these as best as possible, but it's not 100% successful. Most of them choose to find a shelter for the night.

This situation is different from the one that creates the tent cities. From the interviews these are people who lost their jobs because of the economic collapse. Shouldn't a 21st century society provide some sort of safety net for these people so they can maintain some diginity?
mod_wsgi. If nginx is serving as a proxy or a file server too? If the former, I'd go with HAProxy. If the latter, Lighttpd works very well with Python and FastCGI.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512291
Features That Apple Must Consider For The Next-Gen iPhone
Tony, you will be in my prayers tonight; god I hope they get hold of you in time.
Dude, you keep moving the goalposts here. I explain one part to you and you change the subject to be something else.

I'm talking about the theory of governance, which doesn't go anywhere. Some things work and some things don't. There is a reason why the United States became such an economic powerhouse. Those first principles don't ever disappear.

So when you say something like you do not earn anything outside the platform society provides for you: it's demonstrably false both in historical and current terms, it reverses the role of the individual and society, and it adopts a wealth redistribution principle that has failed over and over again.

Other than that, it's a great idea. I'll leave you to it.
Exclusivity is necessary for a community to maintain its character. I don’t have a problem with making it clear what the HN community interests are.

Also, technical != elitist. I think the community is much more interested in maintaining its technical character than declaring itself "better". People who feel excluded should understand what HN is about and that it may not be their cup of tea. HN members should be welcoming to the folks who self-identify as technical but shouldn’t go around calling non-technical folks "idiots". Asserting the HN identity doesn’t mean degrading others’, and I think most people here understand that - please ignore those who don’t.
According to http://erlang.org/download/, R6B & R7B were released around 2000 and 2001. If the eight myths were dispelled almost 10 years ago, then why bring them up again? Nevertheless, it's great to know that they don't exist!
FWIW, if I ever decide to kill myself, you can use my HN article to make all the comments about human rights you like. It doesn't come across as tactless to me. This is the Internet, remember.
just switched to modwsgi

response time is up to 30 sec with 1 thread and 50 processes. nginx is up front as a proxy and a file server.
Yep, I tried to enter the site earlier without success. Finally I got the annoying front page, all full of Erlang links, and finded it funny after reading the related story, but this is not going to make the site any better.
Quake network layer: Reliability over UDP.
Have you benchmarked the same app running on Lighty and FCGI? You shouldn't have to change much, if anything.
Haskell has (optional) dynamic typing now:

http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/D...

I have played with it a bit, and haven't had the occasion to use it for anything important. Static typing is good enough for me. (And this is coming from someone who mostly programs Perl.)
Our spouses are both very supportive; the issue is the simple practicality of picking up and moving to a new city. We're not kids just out of college who can pile into a cheap apartment and live on ramen; moving costs alone would probably eat up half our stipend.
I love this. It's actually not easy to find a ton of good stuff on Erlang.
no. is that a common solution for hi-traffic service?

what would lighty/fcgi replace?
I'm all set with Erlang now.
Filing Ethics Complaint Georgia Bar and Lawsuit Against Mann Bracken Attorneys
From the mailing list:

As an update to everyone who is assisting looking for Tony:- Tony's family are fully aware of the situation and have been contacted. Police are assisting with the matter, but as of yet Tony is un-contactable.

He has taken his motorbike; if anyone can suggest where he might be please email kristian.domagala@gmail.com or brad.clow@workingmouse.com and we will forward the information on.
Learn the Power of Amnesia with Erlang
Use Kismac to collect MAC addresses with significant packets in/out, clone a MAC, ssh -D9091 to my remote server, tunnel everything through my local SOCKS5 port 9091. Works well enough for me.
Even under the less restrictive licenses like BSD/Apache/MIT, there is a strong incentive to contribute private changes back to the project. If you don't, then the public version and your private version start to diverge and it takes more and more work to take advantage of fixes and new features as the public version progresses.
No. It will fix itself.
I've only heard Mr. Morris' name in passing but it sounds like he's in unbearable pain.

I'm on the fence about people's right to kill themselves. But when someone's in pain I try to accept the decision even if I disagree with it.

In that way I feel kind of weird about this.

I know I have developed friendships with people online. I care about these people as much as I care about people in the real world and if they were in this situation and wanted to say goodbye I'd want to hear it.

Launching a search party to stop him based on this goodbye discourages others from saying goodbye in the future.

I don't know. I guess if I read this message from a friend I'd probably instinctively do the same thing and rush to stop them. But as someone detached it just makes me feel uneasy.
Bits of Erlang
Valley Exec Twitters Through Home Break-In
Erlang T-build
New Battery Could Recharge in Seconds
Erlang vs. Haskell
SocialMedia Launches Interactive “Word of Mouth” Social Ads
Google Also Likes To Use FriendFeed For R&D; Reader Gets Conversations
$12 Computer: Playpower Wants to Save the World 8 Bits at a Time
Another Friendfeed competitor?  Google reader adds conversations for shared items
Fuzed: A Distributed Erlang Frontend for Heterogenous Clusters
I have never laughed this hard when checking out the HN front page everyday morning.
Boltzmann’s Universe
What caused that outage
HN was down today for around 2 hours. Sorry about that.

The News server currently crashes a couple times a day when it runs out of memory. All the comments and stories no longer fit in the 2 GB we can get on a 32 bit machine. We'd been planning to upgrade to a new 64 bit server. In the meantime it was arguably a rather slow form of GC.

Unfortunately the process somehow got wedged in the middle of segfaulting. We're not sure why and will probably never know. But that meant the process that usually notices when News is wedged and restarts it was unable to kill it.

Fortunately rebooting the machine solved the problem. But now we'll presumably be switching to that new, bigger server sooner rather than later.

As far as I can tell it was a coincidence that this happened today. It doesn't seem to have been caused either by the increased traffic, or the excessive number of posts about Erlang.
I wasn't sure if the title was really appropriate, but I was thinking of how facebook seems to be adopting a lot of friendfeed features, and now Reader too.

Then I noticed that a techcrunch article with a similar title was submitted almost concurrently:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512795
You're gonna be UNCOMFORTABLY PARALLEL
What are you looking for? The cipherpunks movement is kind of dead; it's a bit like being a compressionpunk.
A short concise description of Erlang would be welcome, given the Erlang tweet storm on HN.

I know nothing about Erlang, except for the hype :O

offtopic.. is there much activity around the arc lisp dialect [if you'll forgive me calling it that] these days?
Root beer or apple juice? Baseball or candy? Kitten or voice mail?

What?
Hackers are regular people.
Ask HN: How do you decide if another person would be a good co-founder?
A serious question for hackers or would-be hackers. I think the most serious barrier to many start-ups ever getting started up is the would-be founder who knows better than to go solo, but who isn't sure how to find a suitable co-founder. What do you suggest for finding a co-founder?
Can you code? You might be surprised what your consulting bill rate is. F' funding.
IPhone prototype seller speaks: phones remain in private hands
What's up with the Erlang spam?
Every story on the front page is about Erlang? I guess in three days we'll see a story about "How I hacked Hacker News!"
Yes. My contact info is here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek
buy a server load balance with nginx and throw a duplicate copy of everything on that and use the same db since it's not your bottleneck.

Start looking for code you can optimize such as bad loops.
No, we both code. :)
Paying Entrepreneurs To Find the Right Business
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145

Read the first comment, too.
Steve Wozniak on Dancing With the Stars. Goes SM for Votes
Read pg's post of earlier today, and the comments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145
I thought about this a while back - a big negative to it would be that if someone sees traffic coming from HN and comes to sign up and answer questions and feedback in the comments. I've seen lots of great first comments after signing up by people who had their content reached.

A similar idea would a hard limit on comments for new people for the first day? 3 or 5 perhaps?
And I had to upvote it.
I've got Erlangst
I don't know about "modern" and "expressive", but it's definitely faster, and I really like the fact that the compiler catches 95% of the silly errors I'd make in a dynamically typed language.
I must admit, I've been coming here (I suppose lurking) for quite some time and was a bit surprise to see all the Erlang submissions. Then I read this and it totally cracked me up. Thanks for the laugh, guys.
Social Investing Site KaChing Opens Up It's Erlang API To Developers
e-junkie is just a wrapper around Paypal/Google Checkout/etc, so they don't show up on the credit card bill ever. I take minor steps to make sure their branding doesn't show on my website. See here:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2008/06/12/how-to-use-e-junkie-with...
but it's calling all those ar_funcall2 or whatever ... not that much indirection really.
I'd love to have a reasoned debate over this.

I'm an American who has "spent enough time running around the world" to see what a farce this is, and I've settled in a non-US country which is, in my opinion, vastly superior in every way but shopping and the costs of setting up a business and the friendliness of waitstaff.

Come out, masked downvoter.
Fuck, that's awful. If anyone ever is contemplating suicide, or knows someone who is, refer them to:

http://www.metanoia.org/suicide/

Some thoughtprovoking things and resources on there: "Suicide is not chosen; it happens when pain exceeds resources for coping with pain."

When you constantly look into the deeper meanings of life and analyze where everything is at, there's lots of things most people don't notice that are pretty crummy about life. It's sad to see that often the most thoughtful, intelligent, kind people have the weight pile up on their shoulders. when I get to know people, sometimes I ask questions most people find to be taboo. One thing I realized - a lot, if not most truly transcendent thinkers contemplate suicide at some point. And it's a damn fucking shame when it happens.
> Will the border patrol decide that anyone who is "stupid" enough to give up a US passport must be a terrorist?

As an American who plans to give up her citizenship at the very first possible moment, that is my fear as well.
No employees or VCs. Family doesn't care what I do as long it's what I want to do and gets the bills paid. They trust me to do the smart thing. I think quitting when you're only down by $100 at a casino is a smart thing.
If it was the Nike cube, there'd be muggings over the cube.
Paul Buchheit also mentioned that on Friendfeed...
And he took this shot:
http://i.friendfeed.com/76a111b707ae67ae4924d5e86adf919e5867...

And here is the story:
http://friendfeed.com/e/f7adf57a-17d3-4ec2-aa41-0f982320b809...
So India has been making $12 computers all along.

I'm envisaging a billion smart, dedicated but poor programmers creating a new software eco-system... and the 6502 being improved til it disrupts our bloated CPU's and software stack. Slipstreaming on a blazed trail, rates of improvement would be more rapid than Moore's Law (though for large scale, it would have to wait for the relevant patents to expire).
I think it's $85,000 and that's USD, which is, of course, a lot less than it used to be.
Is there an erlang joke on YC.news ?
ASP.NET MVC Translated for the Web Forms Programmer (1 in a series)
Girl Developer breaks down MVC for web forms developers.