skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is amazing. Just glancing through that newspaper23.com site for a few seconds, I am amazed at how many headlines are written to be panic-inducing or inflammatory, rather than simply calm reporting. That was more an eyeopener to me about the status of today's news than anything else.
The subtlety you are referring to in #2 is that we moved from puppet for deployments to puppet to configure template nodes. We baked AMIs from those template nodes and deployed those, drastically shortening our time from boot to serving traffic.
As the footer to the article says, this is a shortened version of a much longer essay he wrote in 2010 (src PDF: http://dobelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Avoid_News_Par... ) that shares a similar layout to the article. There's some subtle irony here -- the original essay asserted that heavy news consumption prevented most people from reading more than 4 pages straight, while the essay was 11 pages. I guess he realized he needed to shorten it to get the message out.
Not to mention a real, live, bona fide use of the word dis-Establishmentarianism(1) in the wild. Golden.

(1) Historical perspective: If you happened to be a theater major, hung out with such, or even did sound and lights for some rinky-dink drama club in the 90s like me, you heard this word ad nauseam spoken by people who had no earthly clue what it meant. For bonus points, they often stuck another "anti" to the front of it.
I think both of you are being unfair. Find me an example when some newcomer submits a patch and gets flamed by Linus. His flames tend to steer clear of actual code (at least at the start), and of outsiders.
The problem with the standard approach to monopolies is that in the long term the corporation ends up having power over government, while popular power is disorganized and diffuse. See Government's End by Jonathan Rauch or read about the Problem of Collection Action by Mancur Olson.

My current thinking is that the best route would be to alter corporate charters to give consumers voting power as the company increased in market share. So if a company had 70% market share, there might be a consumer elected board that had the power to veto anti-competitive acquisitions, changes to the terms of service, changes to privacy policies, revocation of open access, etc. If you have Congress trying to regulate the company, the company will end up controlling Congress. But an elected consumers board should have a better shot at representing the interests of the customers of that company.
You can try my news side project: http://newstandoff.com
Darpa Cyber Chief Peiter “Mudge” Zatko Heads To Google
"reality has a left-wing bias"

The ABC (Australian version) gets comments that it's heavily left-wing, yet they have their own internal metrics that watch for evenness of opinion, and these have to match up with an external auditor.

Of course no-one can be neutral about a subjective topic, but it's interesting that those news organisations with strong reputations for quality general-news reporting are always seen as 'left-wing rags'.
Keynesian economics is mostly just based on the idea that consumer demand drives the economy ("aggregate demand"). This demand usually is discussed in terms of consumer spending, but this is frequently misrepresented by strawmen such as "Keynesians just thinks reckless spending is the solution to everything" or "Keynesians think the way to get out of debt is more debt."

This is false. For example, it's not contradictory to believe in Keynesian fundamentals and supply-side economics, if you think tax cuts would indeed stimulate private spending to the point of increased tax revenue (which actually did happen when marginal tax rates were cut from 91% to 70% as was done in 1964[0]). You can also be a Keynesian and believe in a balanced budget, if you think deficits are causing inflation that the Fed needs to keep interest rates high to fight, and thus those high interest rates are suppressing private sector economic activity (as was true in the 1990s[1]).

The Great Recession has caused the bizarre circumstance of a liquidity trap[2] -- simply lowering interest rates isn't stimulating economic activity, and inflation is low. The Keynesian prescriptions for this are unconventional monetary policy (the Fed's "quantitative easing," which can be done because there's little risk of inflation) and government fiscal deficits (to make up for the lack of consumer demand). Somehow this gets warped into thinking that people like Ben Bernanke and Paul Krugman think you can solve any economic problem by printing dollars and/or getting into more debt.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1964

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/08/06/w...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidity_trap
RTFA. Or don't, and simply understand this: "the news", as referred to in the OP, is actually a subset of news in general, in the same way that fast food is a subset of food in general.

The point is what while most people can easily distinguish between fast-food and proper food, many people aren't nearly so discerning when it comes to their information diets.
This is 100% correct. We also generated static snapshots of the origin and mirrored to S3. In the instance of something going awry with our primary origin servers, we could fail back to S3 as an origin.

EDIT: I'll add that our origin offload for WWW hovered around 98%.
>I think we can credit this to Peter Thiel: since Thiel had first hand experience at PayPal, he probably has tremendous respect for hackers (I don't know what his personal hacking skills are, but I suspect they are good).

Peter Thiel's educational background is in philosophy and law [1]. There's been no public demonstration of hacking ability from him. I'd suspect that his respect for hackers was (if it didn't exist from earlier years through his personal relationships) grown from his partnership with Max Levichin in founding PayPal and keeping it afloat during those tumultuous years via multiple technical breakthroughs (including fraud detection, researched and developed by Levichin).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#College_and_law_sc...
I completely agree with the premise... but does anybody else find it ironic that an article explaining why you shouldn't read the news is published on a news website owned by a major newspaper?
I am not sure I understand you- it is both actually. Making typos and being a french speaker are not exclusive.

It seemed to me that "gauge" was generally accepted use in that meaning. The American Heritage College Dictionary, Fourth Edition says:
gauge also gage (gāj) n.
(...)
3. To evaluate or judge: gauge a person's ability.

Anyway, if the original phrasing bothers you, please excuse my french :-) and read that as an evaluation of interest before engaging in formal work.

I am concerned that the idea of bitcoin as a government black flag operation, while not fully impossible (I'm glad pg posted this), may sounds like a nutcase conspiracy theory.

Even if the topic is interesting, since from this discussion it seems to be quite unlikely, it does not seem very logical to investigate the issues as more than a side project unless there is a minimal number of people sharing the opinion that it is indeed worthy of further analysis.

See that as a threshold: time is finite while possible projects are infinite. Proper research, as suggested by another poster, will require organisation - even the basic task of setting up a microryza page.

One must use a ranking function. I am uncomfortable with committing to work of doubtful quality and interest. I frequently use HN as a source of "external reasoning", ie a place to submit ideas and see if they are plausible, if the reasoning is sound, ie whether they pass the scrutiny of a technical audience.

I spent many minutes writing down my opinions on this idea, I read with great interest the replies and the other comments, now I'll rest and estimate whether I should spent more time on that.

As jacquesm said in this very thread, even if I don't fully share his conclusions "I've spent more time (...) than is good for me".

There are questions about possible vulnerabilities in the secp256k1 (the Koblitz curve) I did not know about and whose investigation will consume time. Also, the relation between the US and the Federal Reserve shareholders, with the 6% interest rate are interesting. Being french, I know a little about the ECB. Increasing my knowledge about the inner working of the US system will take time.

Even if I'm glad I'm not the only one with such questions, I am wondering if I am spending more time on the topic than it is worth, and how productive any work on such issues could be

I'll sleep on that.

Sur ce, bonne nuit (and that's french)
> 2) GoogleTalk, who uses that?

Everyone I know. It's the only person-to-person (ie not irc) chat protocol I use. OTOH, at least it's jabber, which is federated. So yeah.
> That contract is the block interface, and includes the ability to change the filesystem.

The article argues that we should change this contract.

> The interfaces are fine.

The article argues that they are not.

> Change for change's sake should be avoided.

The article argues that we should change them for performance's sake.
I graduated in 2002, which was the same year FCPS moved to a race-blind admissions system. I remember because there was a lot of consternation about that year's freshman class having a single black girl out of 450 students or so. My class was at most 30% asian, maybe 25%. So it was a pretty dramatic shift over 10 years to the current composition: http://www.tjprep-va.com/TJ_Admission_Stats_from_2005-2010.p..., http://www.fcps.edu/cco/pr/tj/tjadmissions0412.pdf.

I think it's more than just alumni griping. I loved my experience there, but TJ was a very different place in 2002 than it was in 1998. In 1998, the school had the original principal, Geoff Jones. There is a (possibly apocryphal) story about him that the Chinese government donated a bunch of money for a Chinese language lab, and he just spent the money on other projects. He did an incredible job of keeping FCPS out of our hair. His replacement sucked (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05...). She was that typical kind of educator that used the word "special" a lot. My brother (2004-2008), indicated that he seemed to think there was a lot more competition and less collegiality than when I was there.

On the other hand I think to a degree the asians are taking a lot of the heat for other problems with the school. The period of changing demographics just happens to be correlated with the period during which FCPS exerted more influence over the school.
... "Ignorance is bliss"

Happiness maybe isn't always the optimal end state.
At one time I worked for a company that, as a side development effort, built some pretty cool data processing software. It was built as a side effort to support the desktop software we were selling as the main line of business.

Since we were running on a single desktop, it never occurred to us to think about large server clusters cranking away on data day and night. We just had to make it work on a regular 'ol single machine. Since user experience is paramount in user-facing desktop software, it meant clever algorithms and performant code to get it to process the data in a timely fashion.

One day, one of our customers found themselves incredibly dissatisfied with the money and manpower that was being poured into a "big-data" data processing solution on another project, 3 FTEs and a half-dozen very expensive servers.

On a lark he asked us if our data processing tool could do what their big-data system was doing. As it turned out, functionality-wise, we were about 80% there. With a couple months worth of work we were 95% there. The big question was performance.

The customer setup a single instance of our single desktop data processing software and kicked it off. A few days later it had finished. "It's not fast enough" he said. So we spent a few months making it faster and getting rid of bottlenecks. We got it down to just a few hours. "It's not fast enough!" he said again.

So we halved the time...but that was it, it was pretty much all the performance we were ever going to get out of our code-base. We asked "how long does your big data system take to do what we're doing in a morning?", fully expecting that their multi-million dollar solution was cranking through the same data in a ten minutes to a half hour or so.

He responded, "two and a half weeks".

A year later, the other solutions provider called us up and asked us if we were interested in purchasing their big-data processing division. We politely declined.

The point is that sometimes the giant software stacks and interconnected clustering systems we build to tackle "big data" sometimes introduce so much overhead into the system that a single system, running some smart software can outperform the larger systems. We engineers sometimes get incredibly lost in the details of making cool things work to stop and ask ourselves if what we're doing is actually the best approach in the end.
Sorry what does "junked your post" mean?
I am sure I am just going to have this comment buried because people don't like to have Python and Ruby compared unfavorably, but I have to try to help people out.

Looks like a lot of people STILL haven't caught on to how big of a performance advantage Node.js's V8 engine gives you over Python and Ruby. Look at benchmarks like this one: http://fengmk2.github.io/blog/2011/fibonacci/nodejs-python-p...

Most of the time modern JavaScript is compiled to native code. Its much faster than you realize.

The cleanest code is a new language called CoffeeScript which compiles to JavaScript. Its more Pythonic than Python. Its the closest to pseudocode that you can get (especially if you avoid a few Rubyisms).

The best APIs available are in Node.js modules (see npmjs.org). Best meaning most advanced API design in that the modules are focused, decoupled, very straightforward. This is also by far the best design for package management and dependencies since it is very open and flexible.

On top of that, Node.js is built from the ground up to support highly concurrent input/output. It just amazes me that people haven't figured out what a big advantage Node.js and CoffeeScript provide over Python or Ruby.

I actually think that a big thing holding people back is that Node.js and CoffeeScript make things so much easier, people think its cheating, and are afraid their programmer friends will think less of them if they take advantage of something that really simplifies their jobs.
One problem is that the author doesn't realize that you need a hyphen to combine two words into one descriptive term. A rent seeking economy is like an animal seeking shelter.

But a rent-seeking economy is a type of economy.
And make it harder and more injury inflicting, especially for those who keep in the back jeans pocket.

Besides being useless, it's absurd too!
Cell service would be worse off if anyone could decide to broadcast on any frequency; just like the tragedy of the commons[1], putting more emitters in the same frequencies raises the noise floor until it's simply impossible to get a good signal to noise ratio. Fixed spectrum allocations might not appear to be the best solution, but the alternative is just much worse.

While ISPs in Canada suck, here, last mile infrastructure owners are forced to lease their infrastructure to competitors; it means that if I am unhappy with my cable provider's internet service, I can get cheaper service provided by someone else over the same physical infrastructure. As you mention, that competition is healthy, even though the infrastructure owners try to gimp their competitors in every way allowed under the law.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Yes and no. In practice, you're going to fold into a different domain, which causes the types of the reduce function arguments to be different. Moreover, you are not going to have your reduce function conveniently in a library. You are going to have to write a loop body. At which point, choosing a block over a for loop becomes purely religious.
>>SMS and mobile phone push notifications like horse and buggies.

So, get it through an additional device, right? How easy and sth next-gen that is then?
I've never seen any other project that anthropomorphizes the code like that

Git's SubmittingPatches document says to use an imperative tone in commit messages. That's why it reads the way it does.
This application is currently only available on Android.
Agreed.

The libertarian fantasy that once we sufficiently undermine governments they will fall and a utopia of individual action free of tyranny will reign is just that - a fantasy. Governments are being weakened by the forces of corporate globalization and the winners aren't the masses. They're a tiny band of corporations and a small wealth elite that controls access to resources via control of those corporations. While overly oppressive government can indeed by a terrible problem, it is often overlooked that an elected government is the only means by which the masses can effectively contain the voracious appetites of giant corporations (which will often act in ways that aren't even in their own long term interests, destroying much of the economy on which they feed).

Free markets when well regulated by a government accountable to the people represent a happy medium, which served us well for an extended period in the 20th century. We seem to have lost that. Instead we're left with crony capitalism and government which acts on behalf of the highest bidder. The worst of both worlds. It is a lot harder to overthrow our corporate overlords in this world of weak governance than to overthrow an oppressive ideological political regime.
The scarcest resource in big data is analyst grey matter, not CPU cycles. Distributed computing can be a bad choice for data analysis because it transfers work from computers to humans: analysts have to spend time explicitly thinking about how to express their queries in a form that could be efficiently parallelized. The fact that every big data vendor advertises its product as doing this work for you is a good sign that it's a pain point.
Wait, men fake orgasms?
Does this include hacker news and reddit? Cause I already gave up most other news.
I've always had problems immediately referring to left or right. As a kid I had to recall which hand I used for the pledge of allegiance to remember which side was right vs left. To this day it takes me a couple of seconds of thought to pull it out when my mind is not already primed for it.
Right!
The app I am working on with a friend of mine was prototyped within 30-40 minutes at a coffee shop on a note book(it wasn't napkin and I keep a notebook in my day pack). We have not completed it yet. 1+ yr passed by and neither have we had to add much to the original idea and look/interface.

Because it was sth that we always wanted to use ourselves. It was a need that we felt. Okay, this should be like this and that like that. But working on it is tough! Because then comes the dirty little details. Making it happen usually too tough. Many give up, we might as well!
What about culling the news to those stories that you exactly need or want, such as heath, medicine, art, a favorite sport, the weather, and/or business. Perhaps that can lead to a more productive and creative life?
Okay. Nonetheless it is an important indicator of the direction in which the school is going (increasing YOY proportion of Asian-Americans).
but it is this unhappiness that drives progress - if people are content, there would be no new innovation to try and improve the status quo. If there is no selfishness, there would be no incentive and desire to outdo your neighbour (or competitor).
I believe it's Einstein who said that knowledge is only knowledge when it is applied.
That's actually what reminded me of this article.
CISPA 2 Passes Committee, Headed to House
What the hell am I going to do with a VGA display when the only output I have is a serial cable? And then why should I pay for a VGA cable? I can connect my vt100 anywhere with a cable I can make myself.
Hun, how could a link be in Chinese and Reset error BOTH?

Image here:

http://i.imgur.com/GRvFC6v.jpg
>Actually, I think profit sharing (properly structured) is a lot better than equity.

Towards the end of last year, I spent quite a few hours thinking about a compensation structure that wouldn't completely screw over non-founders in a start-up -> small size company setting.

A "profit sharing" style set up is exactly what I came up with after several days of considering the subject, with departing employees selling their "shares" back to the company at some pre-arranged multiple of earnings or book value.
Does there is any interest to diagnosis you are aspie or not? From what I read here, it can be very helpfull for children, but it is not clear for adult people.
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/instruments

I need to know everything about that binary. How it works, what ports(unix domain & network sockets), files it opens on the harddrive, libraries it's linked to, how it decides what to do. Anything & Everything there is to know about it. ^_^
The world is a dangerous place. There is no way around it: it's always been this way. Whether it is a North Korea crisis, something burning in the Middle East, or our national debt, the news can bring you to the reality of danger, of war, of looming financial crisis.

Sure, by not reading it, you can retrieve yourself to a happy place in San Carlos or Palo Alto, but the danger still irks there, and it is not going away...

Reality check!
Yes. To be specific, if the net votes are -4, a post is maximally downvoted.
On the macro level I totally agree. But on a personal level it may be different, even though we're all benefiting from inventions of those that went nuts and lost many years of sleep
Duck Wrapping
Mentor's Thoughts Week 44: Nature or Nurture
> Cell service is compeltely broken because the government "sold" radio frequency spectrum.

Selling spectrum is precisely the approach that was espoused by free-market economists since the days of Ronald Coase. It's not "rigged" or "no competition" any more than any sort of private property is that way. It's a commons resource, and that's the classical economic approach to handling commons resources: privatize them and sell them, so the market can allocate the resource to the highest-value users. You can't farm in my back yard either--that doesn't mean anything is "rigged." It just means that if your farming is higher in economic value than my use of the property, we engage in a market transaction to transfer ownership that moves the resource towards your higher value use.

So this is my little pet area of policy, and I think selling spectrum is the wrong way to go. But then again, I'm not much of a true believer in competition or the free market either.
Try http://skimfeed.com. 60 news sources, 10 titles each, one page, all text.
I never said "cure-all"... I never even mentioned cancer nor did the people in the video.
Me too. But it would be nice if news aggregator sites let you opt out of if it bleeds it leads (given the responses here, there's a market). It's certainly within the limits of the filters they use already for personalization bubbles.

I wrote a script for my local newspaper to spider links from their front page and display the city next to the "read more" links, so I knew if a catastrophe was local or national. If it's national then the wtf improbability goes down and it should be less interesting.
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