skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me, the big win of Passenger is freeing myself from manual administration of Rails apps. Any performance gain is secondary to the fact that I can drink beer while I rest assured my apps are being served.
Of course they should NOT remove it! Like facebook, myspace, and real life, follower counts provide a huge service.

The number of followers is a really strong objective measure of an account's (or a person's) legitimacy.

How do you know the guy that added you on facebook isn't a spam bot? If he has 600 friends (or whatever is average in your social group), then he's probably legit. If he has 0 friends, he's probably not.

How do you know if the guy that's presenting you a business proposal is trustworthy? Based on the number of references or mutual friends or the breadth of his past experience (higher = better).

How do you know that THE REAL SHAQ is actually the real Shaq? Because 650,000 people have already verified it for you.

My point is that external opinions of people (or representations of people) are really important. The easiest way to verify this is to look at sheer numbers - "Tom has 20,000 followers. Mike has 1,000 followers. Therefore, I am risking less by following Tom" is sound logic. People don't have time to research every Twitter account they want to follow. Therefore, Follower Count is a really great way to convey legitimacy quickly.
Why use HSRP version 2?
Summarizing quote: "And they haven't just failed abstractly or in general. They've failed me personally."

Interesting logic.
Well, they have a better business than most businesses, so it stands to reason, no?
Twitter could still use such obvious discrepencies (and does, I believe) to nuke spam accounts without the numbers being publicly visible.
The argument isn't about computing, it's about naming. The argument here is whether a Turing machine is really "universal".
Haskell: It’s like Klingon, but with math
U.S. playing catch-up on cleantech
I like how LinkedIn displays 500+ if you have gobs of network connections, and I doubt Twitter will do something like that.
i bought a sony reader when the kindle 1 was out because i didn't like the kindle's design.

as soon as the kindle 2 pictures were leaked and it looked like it would no longer have issues with accidentally pushing the page turn button, i sold my sony reader and bought a kindle 2 when it came out.
Solaris by Tarkovsky is not uncriticizable, in the sense that "yes, it could have done what it tried to do better".

But a lot of what makes Tarkovsky's film sometimes bombastic is also what makes it work.

Solaris is ultimately about encountering something that you don't understand. The ppl studying it have theories, and draw conclusions, but its nature is ultimately a mystery that resists investigation.

Edit: so much so that essentially it's just a mirror (as mentioned)...the theories people have expose much about their own thoughts and preferences but don't seem to be getting any closer to understanding it...

The film is pretty obviously constructed to make you really appreciate the experience of interacting with the incomprehensible, by being deliberately obtuse and devoid of explanation.

Watching the film is as close as most of us might come to being stuck alone on a spacestation dealing with a high mystery; it's long, uncomfortable, wearying, and ultimately unsatisfying, as you don't come away from it with anything resembling a sense of closure...you end up knowing perhaps less than you came in with.

On the one hand, this makes it a crap movie in some ways: you never find out what 'the answer' is (what is solaris? why is it doing this?) or even a comfortable sense of the end (what happens to kris?). On the other hand, if the point of the film was not so much to tell a story as to communicate an experience, then many of the drawbacks and flaws can be seen as working towards that goal.

Contrast with say the monoliths from 2001: there's some kind of 'mystery' in the sense of 'who built them, how do they work', etc., but that's a very shallow mystery; it's understood / hinted at / explained (in the books, at least) almost exactly that they're artifacts that look for conscious life or the possibility of it, and then give it 'forward nudges' as needed.

So there's still a small mystery: 'who, exactly, built these things? how, exactly, do they work?' but for supposedly incomprehensibly advanced artifacts constructed by incomprehensibly advanced beings the reader walks away comprehending almost everything...

You have to decide upfront: is a film something that tells a story, or is it something that provides an experience...assessment will vary depending your choice there.
Sure. That's a remarkably lethal engineering mistake.
I haven't seen that many women execs at the trade shows to be honest. I know there are a lot of producers that are women and many of the agents for the performers are women / former performers but most of the web companies seem to still have mostly men running the companies. I am not surprised since there is more "tech" or computers/software involved and that is still largely a male dominated field. That being said, there are a lot more women than one would expect working in the industry. And by that I mean, not in front of the camera.
I'd be willing to bet good money that benchmarks are still going to hinge on the speed of your Ruby app and its database access. Apache, despite not being the "new, new thing" is perfectly capable of saturating pretty much whatever connection you have.
Previous HN discussions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=562324

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=562732
"Good for Twitter, but this will not translate into any money for Biz Stone, one of the site’s founders, until the microblogging platform is monetized."

Umm, tell that to the YouTube guys (ironic given that that is the example he uses to make his point). There's no law that says your company has to turn a profit before anyone can buy it.
For health insurance, is there a benefit (so to speak) in staying within the former employer, now client's pool, as opposed to shopping independently? I don't know much about this and what is possible. I've heard mention in the past of some people achieving such an arrangement. Whether that information was correct, I am uncertain.

EDIT: I updated my prior comment, above, to better reflect my uncertainty.
Google Shows a 3% Sequential Dip In Revenues: First One Ever
He also changed the link (while I was writing a comment). It now points to the general NAAL site, instead of that graph, so that you'd have to dig through a wad of information before discovering the link doesn't back up his claim. Bunk.
It might be recession resistant but many of the mainstream porn companies are having trouble right now because of increased competition and also because of the huge amount of free content that can be found on the web via these tube sites.
I've met some really smart guys with IQs much lower than you'd expect, and dealt with some really stupid higher IQ folk.

This accords with my experience after fifty years of life, but is not quite a proof that IQ is meaningless. IQ tests estimate a kind of abstract problem-solving ability useful for many real-world tasks, and correlated with life success in various occupations. But IQ is not the same as rationality,

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...

http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog...

or, if you prefer this terminology, IQ is not the same thing as wisdom,

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=978...

http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Beyond-Flynn-Effect/...

so it shouldn't be terribly surprising to see irrational or unwise behavior from high-IQ individuals, as I certainly have.
I think the fact that Amazon released a second version let fence-sitters know that they were serious about the Kindle as a product. Having the feeling that a product might not be around in 2 or 3 years time causes people a lot of pause.
I like it a lot. I'd been looking for something just like this. I set up a test though, and when it alerted it only emailed me, I didn't receive the gchat messages or sms.

EDIT - Upon further fiddling with it, I added my AIM account in addition to GOOG, then I got both alerts.
My guess is that because this is the 2nd gen, people think it's more refined, that Amazon has had time to work out the kinks, that neither it nor Amazon's ebook distribution are just going to disappear tomorrow. The marketing also seems better this time around. I mean, Jeff Bezos was on The Daily Show hyping the Kindle 2.

It's actually got me considering buying one.
I was careful to allow for that very possibility ...
Best billboard ever (...BMW Checkmate)
I totally agree with this sentiment...actually I've already decided to use Apache/Passenger for an app I'm releasing (hopefully soon for all to review). Today's announcement is really icing on the cake.

My reasoning prior to today's announcement? The convenience of the deploy. The fact that I don't have to dive into Ebb/Thin/Mongrel and figure that out (probably easy for 99% of the people on this thread) means more time to think about other things.

It's also exciting from the perspective that I'm interested in seeing what the Ebb/Thin/Mongrel teams are going to do. Competition is great!
I take it he's never written abstracts before? This article desperately needs one.
How about a retainer agreement? They purchase some of your time each month. This limits your time devoted to their concerns but could also be a distraction from the startup. The rest of your time is devoted to your startup with the retainer giving you more runway.

Any chance your current employer could become a paying customer? Starting off with a customer gives you credibility for capital and other customers.
IANAL, but I don't know that you have to sign any kind of agreement other than you cashing your paychecks and them having a written policy stashed away somewhere.
yes. it will almost definitely be cheaper in total with your employer (i'm not taking who actually pays -- you, your employer, or both).

going solo, it will be more expensive unless you can get in with a group of some sort. for example, you can join up with the freelancers union and get help with your rates (i think -- haven't actually done the work to see whats cheaper).
The structure of fraud - prescient piece from 2002
I didn't think you were being bombastic; I just don't keep up to date with the goings-on of Ruby, so I thought I might have missed something.

I do think it may be a bit premature to call MagLev vaporware though; it was only announced last year, no?

Anyways, thank you for following up, it did help illustrate your point for me.
Is a college degree an absolute indicator for expertise? Of course not. But a college degree is hardly going to be made obsolete by the internet. Networking has always been an important part of getting a job, perhaps more important than any other one factor. The internet can certainly help networking. But I don't believe you can equate networking on the internet with having a degree. The degree points out particular things about you to the potential employer (that you can stick with and complete a degree program, for instance) and I don't think that necessarily equates to "someone vouching for you"
How to Hire-and Get Hired-in a Recession
Uninformed choice of examples: Skype is very profitable. (See the link aston provided.)
He's restricting the input functions so that they're parameterised by the variable that marks the current state of the computer. In reality this occurs often (the variable represents time) but mathematically there's no need for this. It seems to me that he's refining the model of a computer which we can realistically construct and showing that are even fewer things it can compute than its theoretical brethren.
Demon Denim
so now we've had the end of college, twitter, google, the free world, MBAs, etc. etc. etc.

the blogosphere seems to be on an existential kick of late.

must be the bad economy.
This service already exists here (in US, I assume), and is actually a prerequisite of sorts when scheduling an appointment: you have to call the nurse, explain your situation, and go from there. The catch is, you already have to have insurance to be able to do this (which costs much more than $2/year).
So syntax is to blame once again...
Reverend: A general purpose Bayesian classifier for Python.
Another reply in this thread cites some of the research on IQ score trends over time. There probably is more gain yet to be had among disadvantaged populations than among advantaged populations (which have already enjoyed huge gains), but the mechanism of causation of IQ gains is unclear enough that there may yet be a lot of room for increase for all populations.

Even if IQ gains grind to a halt in particular places, there is still much to be done to raise the level of rationality in the population there. (Another reply to this thread just cited Keith Stanovich's recent book What Intelligence Tests Miss,

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...

which is all about how to improve rationality among people of various IQ levels.) And for general social improvement, it is also possible to shape public policies so that they take into account common forms of human irrationality,

http://www.amazon.com/Nudge-Improving-Decisions-Health-Happi...

so that daily life is more sound even if the people living it are neither more intelligent nor more rational.
Good points. That is also the theme of the book - the mystery beyond comprehension. The echoes of Borges (the staggering fictional encyclopedism) serve the purpose of suggesting the titanic struggle of the mind to grasp the unknowable anyway.

Soderbergh's version avoids dealing with the mystery (well, it's pushed in the background) and focuses instead on psychological exploration. The scope is much more narrow, and it's a very simple movie - in a way. But it does what it set out to do very well, it's very focused on its goal and taut. And the images and the camera work are mesmerizing - I was "tripping" mouth agape all the way to the end.
It all depends on the engine and the boat. You'll probably only get a mile or two to the gallon, but then you're not driving it around like a car. You then also have to consider that people regularly drive around in vehicles on a daily basis that aren't all that more fuel efficient.

If you actually care that much, you could always spend a bit more money and go solar. Boats is one of the few vehicles where solar power works well and has proven itself (for example, the first usable solar boat is thought to have been made in 1975). You also don't have to go just solar, boats have been powered by wind for centuries and the water generally has much stronger wind than land anyway.

I wouldn't doubt that it would be easy to go green and make your fuel cost zero.
I'm trying to test a URL that checks if the result is cached, and if so, redirects to the cached text file. So the http response code is either 200 or 301, it'd be nice if I could set the the response code check to not 500. Also, I get an error when I try to remove the response code assert. "Error Check that the URL is correct. " https://sitecanary.com/deleteassert/1054/1110
VCs building sand castles that float
He will, sooner or later. I've been enjoying Tim Ferriss lately - I think some of his claims are a little exaggerated or over-promoted, and I did not take the time to read '4-hour work week'. However, the guy has a natural curiosity, a thirst for knowledge and the ability to promote his own ideas through entertainment. You've got to appreciate that.
You don't think high speed rail will move more people, more efficiently than continued expansion of air traffic and highways?
What about the costs of constantly finding new accommodations/services in unfamiliar countries?

I'm sure there are certain time savings from not having a long term domestic existence, but it seems like overall you're spending a lot of time to make the nomadic life work. I'd like to see this time cost broken down in a similar fashion.
Retainer--that's not a bad idea. So they could potentially hire me out for X hours per month, and there would be an upper bound on X?

Any chance your current employer could become a paying customer?

Already are, actually.
It's not an article, it's a lecture transcription.
Note to self: determine if they have any IP policy stashed away somewhere.

The startup existed as its own corporation before they hired me; in fact, they hired me because they liked the startup.
The sweet spot absolutely exists. When I went to school in DC, and wanted to go home to north NJ, taking Amtrak was about the same cost as a flight, about the same time (because of airport overhead, and because the airport was further away than the train station), and more comfortable.
Why People Still Want to Move to New York in Tough Times
DIY Currencies
As much fun as it is to decry high IQs as the sole purview of snotty brats who can't actually amount to anything in the real world, it is still nothing but a combination of sour grapes and a biased sample. You notice the brats, you don't notice the high-IQ people that aren't snotty brats.

Science says that A: IQ clearly doesn't measure "real intelligence" B: Whatever "real intelligence" is, IQ does correlate with it fairly highly (as well as a number of other measurements), though you must understand what "correlate" means to fully comprehend that and C: real intelligence has real impacts on your real life, no matter how wonderful or awful that may sound.

It's real. The science is strong. The science is much more complicated and nuanced than most people understand, or, more profound, than most people want to understand. If you want to really understand the world, dismissing IQ is not a good start. (Nor is putting it on a pedestal, of course. If you want to understand the real world, recognizing that there is ground in between is also pretty helpful.)
With Opera 9.64/Presto 2.1.1 on XP it renders fine.
Please look up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_machine.

The purpose of a machine with interactions is not to be more intelligent, it is just to be able to execute a larger body of computations than a machine without interactions would. You can't model operating systems on Turing machines, for example, precisely because they need to interact.

This is from the Wikipedia entry on Alan Turing:

"In June 1938 he obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton; his dissertation introduced the notion of relative computing, where Turing machines are augmented with so-called oracles, allowing a study of problems that cannot be solved by a Turing machine."
I was making fun of the analyst who claims to know YouTube is losing massive amounts of money but actually doesn't have any real facts.

I do bet YouPorn has trouble converting ads though since they give everything away and have huge foreign traffic (80+ percent is foreign). And as an Alexa top #100 site the expense does have to be massive.

There was a great article about YouPorn a while back that talked some numbers:

http://www.portfolio.com/culture-lifestyle/culture-inc/arts/...

They tried to sell to Vivid, but Vivid balked because of legalities (hard to comply with the law with user generated porn). Back then they were doing $120k a month in advertising.
I am calling for all people to stop following both @cnn and @aplusk.
Let's count the cost of trains against the cost of airport expansions and highway expansions. We're already spending billions down in Tucson to move to four lanes, and we'll have to move the entire highway between Phoenix and Tucson to 3 lanes from two soon. We are trading costs in a case like that.

Remember, our population isn't going down in this country anytime soon. Highway expansion, without an alternative, is a given.
Do you get offended when people think you are a programmer?
Isn't it like people thinking that a novelist is literally a writer? And might be willing to write a novel based on their ideas if they share the profits with him/her?
Except we're not talking selling a site, we're talking about actual operating profit.
Zero to Brand in 48 Hours - A Webinar for Startup Founders and Brand Hackers
not really. i don't tend to get offended at this by default because most people who say this type of thing just don't know any better.

i might get annoyed if someone was doing it on purpose with the intent to get under my skin or something.
Yeah, keep in mind Soderburgh had a budget; Tarkovsky did his on a shoestring budget, and some of the wtfs (like the driving sequence) result from budgetary issues.

Soderburgh certainly improved a lot on the cinematography, no argument.

For people with a lot vested in their critical opinions I'm sure criticism of solaris is a no-go; for a lot of others, though, it's one of those films where you can see how it could be so much better if remade with less budgetary constraints (we don't need a cgi planet, really, but just a second-draft to get it right)...and Soderburgh being Soderburgh he got his chance.

One thing that's worth remembering is just how narrow Tarkovsky cut the book: the book goes on at great length, but Tarkovsky cut everything down to the core human drama:

- you're sent to investigate the mental health of people out on this space station investigating this incomprehensible object, b/c they've basically stopped communicating

- you get there and instead of anything you expect to find, you find your long-dead wife

- that's a pretty incomprehensible thing, no? It's something Lem included as a pretty smart move, but you could -- literally -- write a whole novel or make a whole film just trying to work through the psychological reactions that'd produce

By restricting that attention it humanizes the encounter with the incomprehensible:

- you get to 'cheat'; a cgi orange planet is obviously a cgi orange planet, and thus not really 'mysterious'; using interpersonal relationships for your mystery lets you tap into very primal emotional hooks

- but at the end it's still left deliberately opaque enough to remain an encounter with the incomprehensible

If you have read more by Lem you'll see his pet peeve is comprehensible mysteries -- just about every story he's written can be interpreted in some way as a kind of parable of how even 'explorers' are mostly uninterested in or incapable of encountering or appreciating anything they didn't already know or understand.

Fiasco fits the bill, as does 'Return from the Stars' (though it's harder to pick out, there). Lem was pretty prolific.
Mine goes roughly 2 kilometers on a liter of diesel, which is pretty cheap by boating standards. The reason is that the engine isn't terribly large, and thus cruising speed is around 7 miles an hour. If I wanted to go 30 miles an hour my fuel consumption would at least quadruple.
It's not entirely their fault. There are people after all who write code for money. So it's not too much of a stretch to think they might be willing to write code if you share with them any resulting profits.

How many people would be willing to write a novel based on your ideas for money? How many would be willing to write a novel based on your ideas for a share of profits?
Time Warner Cable backs down on bandwidth caps!
Time Warner Cable has shelved plans to test consumption-based billing...
Google beats profit expectations, shares rise
Google growth slows dramatically in 1Q
Had a funky original URL from typepad, fixed it and resub'd.
Tear it up guys and gals. You're the best critics (although the reddit crowd isn't too shoddy either).
Big Quantity of Quality >> Small Quanity of Quality
(much much greater)
In other news, while the whole world crashed and burnt in the middle of the crisis, Google grew 6% YoY.
Who still uses Twitter via SMS? Out of those people, who receive tweets via SMS (the ones Twitter would have to pay for)?
Google Announces First Quarter 2009 Financial Results
Socially Adjusted CAPTCHAs
An interactive map of vanishing employment across the US
It is? How about you follow people you know or people who say interesting things. Or does that just make too much sense? ;)
Creating a Culture of Innovation: Why 20% Time is not Enough