skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really interesting reading, to learn how Youtube build its signature, and the get the works-for-all solution: increase your copyrighted music speed by 5%, ingenius :)
FYI, objective morality doesn't require knowledge of moral axioms for people to observe particular instances of morally objective facts. Just as we don't need to know quantum physics to observe physical facts.

Anyways, if morality isn't objective, why get offended when someone insists that it is? He isn't doing anything immoral...
Contracts are useless when shit actually hits the fan, as anyone with motivation and a decent lawyer can wriggle out of them fairly easy. Contracts are a deterrent, and something you can use to keep a client or web provider in line. Sort of like a business nuclear bomb.

And if you're a small guy, either keep your contracts small and simple or don't use them at all. Small biz owners are weary of signing anything and typically work better over a handshake and your word.
Does perpetuate moral humanity work? Of course, it is a necessary, but not sufficient sort of principle.
Ask HN: cloud computing options?
Are there any easy ways to move into the cloud yet? Amazon seems very expensive, Google App Engine and Heroku are too limited (though Heroku is really cool for basic Rails). Just hosting vServers somewhere would probably be OK, though I am not much of an admin.
The fourth commenter at the blog makes an excellent point: people call it 'best practices', but they are actually 'common practices'. The reason something is a common practice, is because it has been shown to work or, lacking measurements to proove that something works, because it makes sense and 'just works'.

Moreover, it's just a non-sequitur to conclude from 'mediocre company X does Y' that 'doing Y makes a company mediocre'. What makes a company mediocre is in the things they cannot single out in clear statements of the form 'we should change practice Z, as it is not good.
Could anyone tell me what "Commercial Support" even means? Does it mean you pay them so you can call them up when you have problems?
GET parameters can ( and often do ) show up in web-server logs. Transmitting sensitive data via a GET ( even over SSL ) may ultimately cause security / privacy concerns.
And they're doing it all without major government help. Something the major telecoms and old industry titans can't say.
That's pretty impressive! How much memory does it need per connection? I think that's the primary metric I'd use to assess Cometworthiness (once all the basic stuff is taken care of, e.g. delivering 1000 outbound events per second takes the same amount of CPU regardless of whether there is only one outbound connection or 100 000 of them).

My main point was that it would be hard to tell if someone somewhere had an HTTP implementation that could handle 250 000 concurrent HTTP connections per 64MB of RAM while yours only handled, say, 5000 per 64MB. (I suspect the former number is achievable; I know the latter is.)

I can confirm from experience that writing an HTTP server that scales well without eating memory or CPU is dramatically harder than just writing an HTTP server. However, it's very easy to do better than apache-mpm-prefork. (No need, though; lighttpd and nginx should both do better at that, I have heard that perlbal does too, and I suspect from experience that twisted.web does as well, although I haven't measured it.)
Are you sure you REQUIRE a cloud? Phrase "Amazon is too expensive" suggests that it might be not the solution you're looking for.

Maybe you could be a little more clear on what you need, because it's hard to imagine what are your requirements that fall in-between of "Google App engine is too limited" and "Amazon is too expensive"?

Also the phrase "I'm not much of an admin" makes it all sound really confusing... Rarely the cloud is the solution for one person's needs. Typically something like dedicated server or vps should be the answer. VPSes can be 6$/m including server's control panel so that you dont have to be "an admin".
Two investment opportunities:

Gold Canyon Resources - has a US property that contains what might be the only mineable deposit of gallium (other than as a byproduct of other mines) which is used in solar panels and other high tech stuff.

Geodex Minerals - Has perhaps the world's largest deposit of indium (plus lots of tungsten, moly etc) in New Brunswick, Canada

The bad news is that both are a long way from production and the economic climate is not helping. The good news is they are dirt cheap. They're both traded on the Toronto Venture exchange.
Deformed skull of prehistoric child suggests that early humans cared for disabled children
Better filters save time
Irrelevant note but as nice as this graph is (and it's clear plenty of thought went into it) why does it include materials they didn't have information on? For instance, Hafnium.
2D programming via composed code-generating widgets
Save 20% ink when printing - ecofont
Check out 'Elevated' - winner of the 4k PC demo category at Breakpoint 2009. It's a fly-through of a realistic looking procedurally generated terrain model with music and some fancy post processing effects all squeezed into a <4096 bytes executable. Even my moderately high-end PC can't run it (I suspect because it shoves an overwhelmingly huge triangle mesh at the GPU) but there's a video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE
Broadly speaking, there are two sets of questions you want to answer:

1. The "really?" set of questions: Is the cloud what you really need? If so, can you architect your system to exploit the advantages of the cloud?

2. The "how?" set of questions: do you outsource the cloud to AWS et al or do you build your own? The details of this are probably worth half a book, but there are many databases to choose from (CouchDB, MemcacheDB, Tokyo Products and LightCloud, thrudb, Project Voldemort, redis, and others) and build-or-manage-your-own cloud computing datacenter (EUCALYPTUS, AppScale, Enomaly, ELASTRA, 3tera, etc).

The answer to these questions starts with "what are you trying to do?" In many cases, the cheapest and fastest way to get going is to provision some virtual servers from Linode or Slicehost and have a go. If you grow too much, 1. congratulations and 2. look at the cloud options.
Hey, House MD has got the same lamp in his office as Y-Combinator (and now I want to know where to get one).
You're a new commenter to this thread, so I will try this again. Perhaps I've been poor at explaining it.

You're self employed. Let's say you sell services. It's the first week of the year.

The first week you did great. Let's say you made $5,000. Woo hoo! But wait, you say, part of that money isn't really yours. So what do you pay? Do you multiply 5K by 52 weeks in the year to assume an income? That's how most people's payroll taxes are done. So let's say you do that and immediately write a check for 1800 bucks for taxes.

Then you make nothing else the rest of the year. You've lost use of that money and you really needed it. Wrong answer.

Let's try again. Let's say you put it in the bank. Now you make another 5K. And another and another. After a month you've made 20K. 6K of that is in the bank.

Then there's no work for a month or two.

At the end of the quarter, you've got 6K in the bank for taxes. Do you write the check? Well -- what's your income going to be? You haven't made anything in two months. So you don't write the check. Then the next quarter you work every week. Wrong answer.

Or you write the check, and there's no more work for two months. Wrong answer.

Or you write the check and need a new server. Or you don't write the check and need the money. Or you get hit with another large business expense. Or somebody goes to the hospital. The randomness goes on and on, and without knowledge of just how your income is going to work for each week for the next year you're guessing at optimization strategies. Note that some of these unplanned expenses are tax-deductible events -- these are items you would take off from your income before taxes anyway. Some, of course, are not.

Allocating the money immediately doesn't work because there's no set amount to allocate without a predictable tax bill to prorate. Saving the money results in various scenarios where the savings conflict with other business realities and you've still got the prediction problem.

The most reasonable strategy that I can create is to pay some kind of guess and then catch up the following year -- after all, you always know what your taxes are for the previous year. But the fact remains that the tax system is made for people with predictable income where the employer takes the money out of their checks. And as the economy gets more diversified and more and more people run their own businesses, this assumption causes more and more problems.

I think calling all of that "poor planning" is a bit oversimplified.
To clarify, this is an excellent presentation about "seductive" UI/interaction design... very very good, with lots of great examples.

Really worth a read and a bookmark. I've also forwarded to my team and we'll no doubt lift a few ideas from there.
Where do you get VPS for $6/m?

Those are usually shared once, aren't they?
Kudos for bringing it up. Now we have a conspiracy to find the elusive poor guy with a cellphone. Maybe next decade we'll develop a cryptomobilanthropology hunting for the unbelieveable miracle of elusive poor guy talking on a cell phone hiding in foggy woods and out-of-focus areas.

Kudos, Adam503, keep up the good work debunking the greatest mysteries of our time!
AWS is not expensive, not at all. However, you can combine GAE and AWS where serving all HTTP from GAE and doing the "rest" on Amazon - that will make it some cheaper
Firstvds.ru (they have US branch at minivds.com). VPSes are never "shared", but they are on "shared" server. I.e. you have root access to your own VPS as root, nobody has access to it (1), but there are many VPSes on one physical server.

(1) ...except for the provider, but even Amazon has access to your files on EC2... (Tin-foil hat time.)
Startups, a competition?
Microsoft trashes its brand — with Apple the big winner
http://www.prgmr.com/xen/, it's run by http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lsc

or, you can pick something on http://www.lowendbox.com/, but be careful - their primary concern is price i.e. they list hosting services that are cheap, but not all of them are reliable.
wtf is up with that video ad.
the sid is inaccessible to js running in another domain context, so anamax is pointing that it suffices to just retransmit the sid as one of the request parameters, rather than generating and including sig=hash(request+sid).

you're right that the remotely invoked request will include the sid as part of the http cookies header - it's what goes into the get/post request parameters which differentiates the domain context of the invoker. and if someone can't generate and include a sig because they can't access the sid, then the challenge might as well just be including the sid.

the only draw back i see is that i wouldn't have had an excuse to learn how to implement sha ;)

*edit: jim_lawless points out below that you might not want a sid showing up in web server logs. my system frequently rotates the clients sid, so it's not a concern to me - but if you do use less transient sid cookies you might want to implement the hash signature approach after all?
Looking at the Russian version of the site, you can get the same type of VPS for $4.44 a month instead of $6, although you get 25GB of traffic instead of 30.

Cloudkick should support this provider.
this is really sneaky. i like it
Why Isn’t the Brain a Green Thinker?
I've used TikiWiki for an internal Wiki here in my company.

a small reason can be read here:

http://design-to-last.com/Technical/intranet-wiki-searching-...

Daniel
Not really an option for US citizens to use Russian version, I think, since all of panels will be in Russian and also you would have to pay in roubles :) /Also you do have to sign a contract in Russian with them and send it back to far east of Russia/
Try http://www.wikimatrix.org/ if you'd like to compare available wiki engines side by side.
Breaking the Slave Clock
How a Personal Finance Columnist Got Caught Up in Fraud
More Effective Text Entry Using E75
The Big Similarities & Quirky Differences Between Our Left and Right Brains
Me too.
It seems that I reliably click on the titles I like least, just to see if they're as bad as I expect. Isn't that odd?
The psychology of coffee
What do piracy and porn have in common?
YES! Dancing lessons and vocal training! Your movement and your tone of voice is the most inportant parts of your nonverbal language!
Each thing alone could be very useful. Take a look at those ballet boys! Even heir casual movements is an artisty, like movements of beast. The voice has an enormous power when developed well. You know all those famous BBC announcers, and of course, famous singers. But together it will be stunning.
And of course, such experience will add +1000 to your self-confidence!
Practice is the best teacher!
No More Free Supports For Windows XP
Free CAPTCHA scripts and services for websites
Facebook TOS vote a con trick?
While I agree with a number of the points he's making, there's a serious correlation / causation problem here.

The claims:
• Most people in America don't know how to think critically.
• People who think critically are literate.
• People who are literate buy books.
• Using bestseller lists is an easy heuristic to see who knows how to think critically.

Obviously, his argument breaks down, in a number of ways. Perhaps people who like low-carb diets have more money that they can spend on books. Perhaps low-carb books have better marketing (I don't think they do ... just throwing that out there). Perhaps low-carb proponents feel that they're biased against by the media and by popular culture, and so they buy books out of solidarity (note the "Fireproof" movie and the urgency associated with supporting it by / within Christian groups).

I'm not saying any of these are the case ... just that it was ironic that he was railing against Americans' ability to think critically, and then he laid out a string of fallacious arguments.

You could push his argument further, and say that, because the Harry Potter books are at the top of the USA Today list, then the typical Harry Potter reader (whatever that is) is better at thinking critically than a low-carb enthusiast — or anyone else in America.
anyone in Waterloo Canada?
great tools and tips about gmail
A Deeper Dive Into The First Quarter VC Investment Numbers
I don't know about "most." But yeah, the story of the poor African who uses a microloan to buy a cellphone that he/she rents to the rest of the village has been told so many times, it's a cliche.

Also there's the one about the fishers and farmers who check on market prices before making the long trek to sell their goods.
I like this idea.. I might even try to make something like this too, but in Flash.
Scaling websites incredibly fast.

Check out this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=565152
Explain what you are doing. The cloud is very much over-hyped and can mean many different things. Are you looking for storage? For hosting? For dynamic hosting?

Explain a bit what your app is and we can give your architecture advice.
As reserves shrink and cost goes up, I suspect recycling will play a bigger role (I'm impressed to see Aluminium is nearly 50% recycled).

This probably hasn't been a significant player before because we've never 'run out' of something so fundamental before so the pressure to make recycling happen, and the financial reward for doing so, hasn't been strong enough before. (OK, it has on the small scale - see the UK during WWII for instance, where we even cut down garden fences around the country for the metal).

Also, I guess recycling is helped by improvements in technology (to extract usable pure materials from a mix), so it will become more practical in the future than it is now, which is more practical than it was 50 years ago.

With electronic communication for coordination it will be more feasible than it ever has been to collect recyclables from 'everywhere', and perhaps one of the micropayment systems that have been hovering on the edge of reality for the past decade will pop into existence and become a driving force. (Maybe. Would I be less inclined to recycle something for cash value 0.001p than for the feeling of doing the right thing?).

We talk about things running out, but where do they go? At some point, it might become feasible and worthwhile to go through the last 50 years of landfill sites in the first world, for instance.

Unless we do develop nano-manufacturing to construct materials from scratch at scale, when this whole discussion ceases to matter so much.
Facebook Will Share Details About Facebook Verified Apps
Depends what AWS service you talk about. Having one slow EC2 instance online 24/7 for a month will cost you roughly 60 dollars. I don't think that is very expensive but considering the available options I also don't think it is cheap. At Mosso you get a similar host for 1/6th of the price these days for example. Charged by the hour.

Anyway, it depends on the specific AWS service.
Here's a list from a few months back. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/258548/what-is-the-most-i...
If you're just looking for storage and have access to extra machines then Tahoe allows you to store your files reliably for little to no cost.

You can learn more here: http://allmydata.org/~warner/pycon-tahoe.html
You can download it here: http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe

EDIT: How do I create proper hyperlinks?
Agreed, and moreso why don't they have information on Hafnium? Is it a secret? Does nobody have an estimate of how much there is scattered about? Are mining companies busy digging for diamonds or copper and oops a lump of hafnium pops up ('ooh what luck, I know a power station owner who will want that!')?

I do hope there's some big Hafnium mining monopoly conspiracy behind this! ;)
I wonder how many people really use Mono. I've always thought it was a failed attempt.

Is anyone here actually using Mono for web or service development? Or even for desktop apps?
Has online piracy reached a tipping point?
first time I noticed that they changed techcrunchuk to techcrunch europe..anyone know how long ago that happened?
It isn't really far off? Basic BCI is here already - the kind which is 'think of nothing to move the cursor left, focus on something to move the cursor right', but that's mostly picking up electrical activity in brain regions. It's a million miles off picking up what you want and making it happen.

Impressive BCI has been done, e.g. William Dobelle's work on brain-linked-cameras for blind people, but that involves major surgery and, if I may say so without meaning any insult to his work, is still on the easy side - feeding signals into the visual cortex and let the brain learn what to do with them without needing to understand how the brain does so.

To interpret anything like "send an email to John Hancock" and other general instructions, but not non-instructions, lifted from your thoughts ...
Best Photos from UK premier of "Star Trek"
Money without intelligence is a much worse problem than poverty! You should use your money smart way.

First of all, distrust all claims like 'money is not everything'. Without money you simply cannot stay physically attractive. You need fresh, organic, mostly veg. food, because a healthy diet is the most important part of your nonverbal value. The skin, the hair, even the teeth - they all depends of food.
Then banal clothes. They must be clean, they must be of appropriate size, they must be new. They could be not expensive, but new.
Then body. You must look young even if you not. So, fitness is the must. Without fitness it is almost impossible to attract people who are younger than you. That is obvious - everyone can see anything. Swimming (look at the bodies of professional swimmers) running, biking, rollerblading, and as mentioned above - active dancing.

So, fresh, organic food, dress code (I'm personally trying to follow anime-inspired style. I love that feeling) and serious training of the body - all these tasks requires great amount of money.

I didn't mention so-called verbal part which is the second side of the coin. In simple words - you must be selfless, interesting, useful - which requires even more effort and daily practice than all these physical activities described above. You need great deal of time, which is money.

So, if you do not have enough money, invest your time in seeking for knowledge and, as result, money. Girls then will find you themselves.
It’s just a major shame that Apple’s business model and contempt for its users is even less appetising than Microsoft’s…

Huh?
I was assuming that operating with virtual images would already count as "moving into the cloud". At the moment, I am experimenting with several small projects and technologies. For example, I consider prototyping a CouchDB project, but I don't think I can install CouchDB on my existing root server in addition to the services it is already running (it is very old).

I don't have a scaling problem atm, but if publishing things to the cloud is easier than going the traditional "set up a server" route, I thought it might be worthwhile to use "clouds" from the beginning (also to feel safe about potential traffic spikes). For example, using Heroku recently was pure bliss, because I really don't want to bother with configuring web servers, databases, firewalls, backups and so on for each of my projects. I would probably manage somehow, but admin stuff is not my main skill. Unfortunately Heroku does not do everything I need in other projects (ie more frequent cron jobs, other tech than Rails).

I suppose having a virtual image for every project would be perfect.

Edit: Re "Amazon is expensive": my projects don't earn money yet, so I am trying to save. My existing root server costs 20€/month, I think Amazon would cost quite a bit more, so it feels expensive. But of course my root server is old and can not handle much more modern stuff atm.
The Power of Peer Groups
If the price is so high that we can't use the stuff do do things we do now, isn't that essentially the same problem?
I noticed balsamiq uses comic sans or something very much like it. Probably one of the few appropriate uses it has.
Identify: Google People With Two Keystrokes
Time ago I was told some wise words: "don't try to please those who don't want to be pleased". When you maintain an open mind talking to people that doesn't, on the long run you end up giving up all you believe in, while the others don't move an inch.

A negotiation works better considering interests instead of justice, but it has to be for both parts. If you see it as interests and the other part sees it as principles, you lose always. I have seen this in some processes that have lasted twenty years..

You can't negotiate with religious organization for this very reason: they see everything as a matter of justice, so while the title is right, the example is hopelessly wrong.
Two things that hasn't been mentioned here yet:

#1 - is that you need to develop a filter for the advice you'll get. You need to learn when to ignore advice, how to make it so that you don't piss people off when you ignore their advice, and how to handle it when you do ignore their advice yet they were actually right. You also need to develop self confidence in your own independent decision making ability

#2 - is that, just because someone has "been there, done that, been successful" doesn't mean that their advice/approach will work for you. Many startups hire on big, powerful people who have had exits/successes yet they don't work out. There can be any myriad of reasons but just remember: "past success != future success".