skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This guy : http://altgate.typepad.com/blog/2008/06/5-reasons-conve.html

seems to think convertible debts are a bad option. Would someone explain why both he and pg are potentially right in their own ways? (don't know if that's the case, but usually ends up being)
You're supposed to just flag it and move on. To another site that takes banishing politics discussions seriously?
If what you say is true, and Goldman hedged their hedge by purchasing CDS on AIG and/or outright shorting them, it should be trivial for a prosecutor to show that they entered a contract with AIG knowing fully that it could never be satisfied (who knows, there may even be a side letter to be found somewhere to that effect...) -- making the contract void and requiring a clawback of any payment made through AIG by Treasury.
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Browse and explore some of your favourite programming languages syntactic rules. See relations between the rules, understand them using both BNF (Backus-Naur Form notation) and syntactic diagrams.
Wow Jim, harsh for you. I've almost always have had great experience with designers as long as the "front load" is good --what you want in concept/brand. I wouldn't presume, though I have other skills, do to what they do.
Totally works.

Just stay at a hostel for the first month in the new country. You'll meet a ton of people from all over world, including some who will be staying in the country, so you'll have friends for at least six months. Hostel folks tend to move around a lot :)

For meeting people, it'll be lifechanging just to see how easy it is-
"where are you from?"
"how long are you traveling for?"
"where are you going next?"
"where have you been so far?"

Everyone's in a foreign country, everyone's looking to meet people, so everyone makes themselves super easy to meet. If you're in a good hostel (I'd HIGHLY recommend Hostel Suites Palermo in Buenos Aires, ~$10/night) then this won't be something you'll consciously be thinking about, it'll just happen.

I worked from the patio of the hostel the first day and wound up going to dinner with eight folks from all over the world, by the end of the night you'd have thought we had all known eachother for years. Give it a shot!
In the UK at least, trains are more roomy, you can easily walk around, have a shop, multiple toilets, and get there in less than half the time of buses. The same things apply in Australia when you're travelling any significant distances.

Yes, within large suburban sprawls the trains are often inferior in some ways to buses, but for longer distances, trains win in most countries. Japan, Australia, France, Gernmany, Denmark, Sweden, the UK, etc.

Mostly they can also use power supplies that are getting cleaner and more efficient as time goes by.
If you don't mind me asking, where in the UK were you came back?

Also it sounds like you were buying somewhere, not renting. A furnished rental apartment shouldn't require buildings insurance, contents should either be part of the rent or not at all (as the landlord is required to insure their equipment by law - but not yours - you'd do that separately but you'd certainly have to do that anywhere else I've been), a TV licence is optional - you only need it to watch live TV and all the major channels have on-demand Internet equivalents that are perfectly fine unlike other countries you may have been (we're looking at ditching the licence when the Digital TV switch kicks in). I'm surprised you're putting phone, internet and mobile phone in there - unless you're flatsharing I'm not aware of anyone that would include those as part of the rent, especially mobile phones?

I guess my point is that it's not a like for like comparison to compare your rental costs in one country with mortgage + all inclusive of everything, even secondaries in another. Rather than defending it, and I appreciate it's a PITA to do what I'd suggest and may contradict what you're trying to achieve, I'd like to suggest that you write a followup comparing like for like costs with their equivalents and provide explicit examples alongside the benefits and drawbacks of each - e.g. being near the beach at Cape Town versus being near the beach at Blackpool.
300 mile sweetspot

Yet again, Southwest.com is $200 from Philly to Pittsburgh, and Amtrak is $110. Except then I'm spending 14 hours on a train round-trip. If I'm going to spend 14 hours on my trip, then I might as well drive to Pittsburgh which takes me 10 hours round trip and about $30 less, not to mention I have a car to get me around.

Of course we could build the high speed network and subsidize the benefits to cut that down to ~5 hours, but then we get to pay the additional cost anyway come every April 15th. Trains are still a lose-lose. The highway system is already subsidized and we lose money on that, there's no reason to subsidize more transportation.

Pardon me for trying to cut the fat when I'm going to be paying my country's debt for the next 20 years.
>>> For a given function, sure. But unless your machine can perform an infinite number of computations per time step, no machine will be fast enough to compute all possible functions, which is the point.

I mentioned this somewhere further down in the comments, but a machine that could perform an infinite number of computations would break Turing's proof of the undecidability of the halting problem over Turing machines. That probably furthers Akl's claim.

I most definitely think this is interesting in that it is a new set of assumptions about what a computer is and what it should be capable of doing. All we have to do now is define a new (probably recursively-defined) automaton capable of infinite growth in it's possible inputs.

Then again, if a computer had an infinite amount of inputs, that raises even more interesting questions about what problems possibly then become decidable.
Folks, the only problem with this article is the HN headline. Aki never claims Turing was wrong.

And I think he is demonstrating something rather interesting: that time dependence has a significant effect on the power of a computing device.
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After reading Mr. Akl's website, I'm reminded of this recent HN post: http://trc.ucdavis.edu/bajaffee/NEM150/Course%20Content/danc...

Also, I would be interested to hear what Stephen Wolfram has to say about all of this (http://www.wolframscience.com/prizes/tm23/index.html).
Not in Germany. Seat reservation costs extra.
That's probably something an individual should consider before choosing to commit a crime worthy of being forcefully exiled from general society.
Would it really remove any pressure to increase follower count? Presumably you could still see your follower count and who is following, and if you're trying to drive traffic or affect a conversation than you're still going to be trying to push it up. If you're feeling silly-competitive about follower count it might kill that irrational pressure, but I really doubt that's a major motivation for that.

The only maybe-positive effect I could see is that it might force readers to evaluate twitters based on content rather than joining a crowd of followers... but for organizations' twitters, that follower-count is often a good first-look evaluation as to how interesting it really is. Watching count also provides useful information about the rate of change of a person or organization's popularity.
This is interesting, but kind of besides the point. What makes "for" evil in Ruby code is that it's non-idiomatic. A custom block "iterator" covers every case where you might use "for", and more elegantly. In 116,000 lines of Ruby code in our "toolshed" directory, I count zero uses of it; almost none of it is web code, and all our developers are ex-Pythonistas.
the famous "sleeping dictionary".

yes, this helps quite a bit.
The being with the fully-cryptic (or almost fully cryptic) consciousness is described in the novel "Solaris" by Stanislav Lem - two movies were made after it, one by Andrei Tarkowski, the other by Steven Soderbergh.

It's a great book anyway, regardless of your interest in the issue of consciousness.
Do you know of any examples where this has been done?
The front range of Colorado & Wyoming is pretty decent a spot too. That's at least a purple area....
Glad to hear it! :) In that case, check out:

http://www.catalystframework.org/

http://search.cpan.org/~drolsky/Moose-0.74/lib/Moose.pm
Isn't that too early to conclude? And they are meant for different purposes anyway.
Do you not understand what highspeed means? The train you're booking today goes really slow. That's not being argued. The trains they want to build go much faster. There are other up sides too, such as internet access and phone service, not having to go through the TSA, being able to take your car for an added fee, etc.

It won't work for all routes, but considering how well Amtrak already does in NE, there's demand out there.
"Economics of the Laffer curve and how it relates to taxation" -> flagged

"Obama adminstration installs Apache servers" or some such -> not flagged

That's what I love so much about standards. Everybody has them.
given the current txt message rates, the cost of sending a txt message might be on par with streaming a video
Well, do I stop working on my Passenger-like Nginx module that uses thin?
Definitely true. Unfortunately, Rails scaffolds and early Ruby programming books propagated this as an acceptable alternative to using iterators, and we're still feeling a bit of the pain from it now.

It's nice that James managed to dig up some technical reasons that extend beyond the idiomatic argument, as it may help push along those who aren't moved merely by the "It's not the Ruby way" argument.
Oh, BTW, the movies are good too.

The one by Tarkowski is a classic and has an almost cult following (almost impossible to criticize it in certain circles). It is a remarkable movie, but I've found it a bit bombastic at times.

The other one, by Soderbergh, is the movie that opened my eyes to the art of cinema - or rather, to telling stories with the image, framing, and camera motion. It's hard to explain, it was like a revelation. I used to be very much focused on music, sound and words, and was almost blind to visual arts. Seeing Soderbergh's "Solaris" was a turning point to me, along with other major changes in my life at that point. I guess I was just getting ready and seeing the movie was probably the catalyst. Now I can actually take pictures in a conscious way and am able to "say" something by just framing the image in a certain way.

I read the book decades ago, when I was a high-school kid. It had a major impact on my thinking. It's a lot more philosophical than what you would expect from a sci-fi novel. Reminding of Borges in a way.
The way I see it, you could program a Turing Machine MF which has some finite "per-time-step" computation speed _n_, such that MF "knows" the following:

1: The general form/program for solving function F for any arbitrary number, _m_, of variables.

2: How to construct a Turing Machine MF' capable of performing _m_ "operations per-time-step", and programmed with 1.

Even in his crazy-town world of redefined computation, the Turing Machine MF is capable of computing any computable function F, of any number of time-varying variables _m_. I.e. given such a function F, MF simply creates a suitable machine MF' and copies the output of MF' to its own output. Thus, MF computes F, albeit by proxy. QED, etc.

It's possible that I'm now in some TM dual to his time-varying primal, but whatevs, I can do what I want.

ADD: As far as the computability results that I am familiar with are concerned, without loss of generality one could also just assume that all Turing Machines have infinite speed. The necessity of introducing the concept of a "time-step" into the definition of Turing Machines only occurs when computation time is actually of interest. Though, for complexity results one could still assume infinite speed, albeit the number of operations would still need to be counted.
You can get it with a 3g datalink built in. Telephony, sadly, not yet.
makes sense.

the most effective anti drinking campaign I saw during my undergrad days was a group called the "silent third" or and the message was to highlight that a third of college students don't do any drinking at all contrary to MTV's and the film industries portrayal of college students.
There's a big difference between "should consider" and "does consider".

So if you're hoping that the fear of solitary-confinement-torture has a deterrent effect, but in fact it does not, should the confinement-torture still be practiced? Is it enough that the jailers get pleasure from the practice?
NO!

Follower count is the only way to recognize spam/junk accounts. If someone follows 10k people and has 4 followers... obvious spam account.
I flag pretty much everything that even remotely smacks of politics, and most economics, no matter which side it comes from or how much I agree with it.
I agree its non-idiomatic. But, I don't think being non-idiomatic is sufficient for something to be considered "evil". When something behaves in an inconsistent or unexpected way, then it starts to approach "evil" territory. Although the term is a little hyperbolic for my taste.
MagLev is a Gemstone object database server, it has nothing to do with this. When it's done, I'm sure the combo will be Nginx + Maglev instead of Nginx + (phusion passenger + mysql).

I've been playing with Gemstone and Seaside lately, it's freaking blazing fast and persistence is automatic, no mapping code at all. You put objects somewhere and they just stay there. No mapping at all beats the crap out of mappings + migrations.

Gemstone is going to make one hell of a web app platform. Especially since you can just add more boxes to the db cluster for scaling it. Only one server can write, but reads are distributed automatically across all servers in the cluster.
How does purchasing CDS insurance on a counterparty imply that they knew full well it could never be satisfied? If I purchase hurricane insurance on my home do I know full well a hurricane is going to destroy my house? It was a precautionary measure for an amount that was the difference between what they were owed and how much collateral was pledged. It indicates nothing of the sort that they knew full well the world was going to blow up and AIG would default

And what I say is true, there are many many public disclosures on exactly what their positions were.
I voted this up because it's no more useless than the comment it's responding to which isn't getting voted down.
So this is why Mermin and Ashcroft's Solid State Physics has been one of the standard graduate texts for the field since it was published in '76.

According to Wikipedia Lev Landau ranked physicists on a log scale - Newton was 0, Einstein 1 and Mermin placed himself on the scale at a 4.5
Your claim is of sync with reality at least with respect to travel between Boston and New York City. Acela Express is much roomier than a bus. Has laptop power connections. Some seats have desks/tables. You can get up and walk around. You can buy food or a drink. Completely different experience. And this is why they can charge airline-level prices (or even more). It beats the planes because you get on at South Station in Boston and you get off at Penn Station in NYC rather than some airport off in the hinterlands.
Geez this guy should write a self promotion book, I've never seen a guy so good at it.
I have yet to see a transportation system that can pay for itself, stay profitable and still be useful. Measuring real benefits of transportation with current economics seems to be very hard. Almost everything has to be subsidized or accompanied by something that is, otherwise it doesn't work. And you're certainly not going to propose abortion of every transportation, as then you would maybe have less debt, but also no country, so it wouldn't matter anyway. Trains are a real thing that is going to work for 100 years or something, that n billions are mostly some meaningles number flying around... (well, yes, that's only my point of view)
Keep in mind that the article itself admits that the loading the data into an RDBMS took much longer than loading into onto a Hadoop cluster.

That's what the main crux is: if your data isn't relational to start with (e.g. messages in a message queue, being written to files in HDFS), you're better of with Map/Reduce. If your data is relational to start with, you're better off doing traditional OLAP on an RDBMs cluster.

When I worked for a start-up ad network, we couldn't afford the latency/contention implications of writing to a database each time we served an ad. Initially, we moved the model to "log impressions to text files, rsync text files over, run a cron job to enter them into an RDBMS". Problem is, that processing the data (on a single node) was taking so long the data would no longer by meaningful by the time it would be in RDMBS (and OLAP queries would finish running).

I thought of "how can I ensure that a specific machine only processes a specific log file, or a specific section of a log file" -- but then I realized that's what the map part of map/reduce is. In the end I've setup a Hadoop cluster, which made both "soft real time" (hourly/bi-hourly) data processing and long term queries (running on multiple month, multi-terrabyte datasets) much faster and easier.

Theoretically, yes: RDBMS is the most efficient way to run complex analytics queries. Practically, we have to handle such issues as asynchronicity, contention, ease of scalability and getting the data into a relational format (which itself is something that could be done using Hadoop: one of the tasks we used it for was transforms all sorts of text data -- crawled webpages, log files -- into CSV data that could be loaded onto the OLAP/OLTP clusters with "LOAD DATA INFILE").
I know you do. I've been watching.

I just enjoy watching the double-standards people employ. For example, in this discussion I'd love to see somebody bring up the point that passenger rail in the U.S. is a political idea and not a practical business idea -- take a look at Amtrak pricing. But by actually diving into the business side of the article, they'd call the resulting discussion political!

I think "political" just means "stuff I don't agree with that has some sort of tangential relation to politics"
Don't give 4chan any ideas.
All the great lakes in Canada are linked, so are many of the other lakes. I personally haven't been on any of the water ways, but I've seen a lot passing through when I've been up to Rice Lake (which is on the Trent-Severn line). Here's the Ontario-Quebec map http://www.canadiancanalsociety.org/maps/map-overview-ont-qu...

I believe you're lucky for boating if you're in the Ontario-Quebec region, I'm unsure about the US. I'm sure there's good connectivity around the boarders for Ontario and Quebec, however I have read that a lot of canals in the US were abandoned because of rail. I think Canada kept most of its canals in service, probably because it was cheaper than building rail, because in some areas you'd never get a straight line of track without a billion bridges.

If you wanted to see all of Canada by boat, I'd probably suggest getting one you can haul by trailer because there's apparently a lot to see by boat on the west coast, lots of little islands and such. However, I seriously doubt there's any way to get past the prairies (you'd probably have to ask someone who lives in those areas). Also, you'd either have to get far south every year, or your boat needs to be pulled from the water, so there's probably not as big of an option of living on your boat here unless you spent a few months in the US riding it out.
While a potent driver of early growth, it's just going to become a hassle and a distraction from actual use.
(not unlike public friends lists on social networking sites)
Why is this selling so much better than the first gen product?

There wasn't any killer feature added, just refinements of existing features (I'm not bothering to upgrade my 1st gen kindle), nothing which would compel an audience beyond the gadget fiends.

Don't tell me e-readers have started reaching a mainstream audience...
Just to make sure, I searched for "interaction" in "On computable numbers...", and it's not in there. And, like I said, in the general case, interaction is "more powerful" than algorithm as often as it is "less powerful".

Edit - Example: You're on "'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" You're in "algorithm mode" for most of the questions, but you're granted one "interaction", via a phone call. On the show, you're allowed to call anybody you want, and if you know to call somebody who's really clever, chances are that interaction will be more powerful than computation. But that's not the general case: the general case would be for you to call a random phone number, and chances are that won't help you - so, in that case, not more powerful.
nice! has anyone done any benchmarks yet?
"Except then I'm spending 14 hours on a train"

HIGH. SPEED. RAIL.

TGV does that distance in 2 hours.
I just did a quick text search both on the article and here in the comments, and I can't believe that no one has mentioned maglev? Please, Barack -- don't build your plain old wheel-based trains, no matter how fast; skip directly into 22nd century and mak a nationwide network of the fastest, most efficient and safest trains known to man.
I see it as related in a vaporware vs nonvaporware context. Rubyists have put up with quite a bit of vaporware lately, so it's remarkable that Phusion continue to deliver with Passenger without blowing smoke. (I'd also put JRuby in this small bucket.)
The point I was trying to make is that performance is the biggest issue with Ruby, and that is a hard issue to deny. MagLev was introduced with the promise of delivering this much needed performance.

In relation to the comment to which I responded, I think it is a big boost to the Ruby community (especially the Rails community) that Passenger and Nginx are playing nicely with each other.

Perhaps I shouldn't have been so bombastic in my statement that the MagLev claims have "gone up in smoke"...that's just my response to the fact that they have demonstrated some pretty amazing stuff but are a little short on delivery.

To be clear Phusion's release today not only promises on a performance boost for Rails, but it also delivers it.

Everybody is 100% right in pointing out that technically speaking, MagLev and Passenger/Nginx are totally separate technologies to solve separate problems, but the goals are the same in my view (delivering better performance for Ruby apps). So I don't think drawing an allusion to the MagLev promises of increased performance for Ruby is unwarranted in relation to what it would mean to the Ruby community at large.
Another issue:

CAP Theorem:
Consistency, Availability and (network) Partition Tolerance: pick two.

RDBMS are excellent at providing consistency and availability with low latency. Yet imagine building a massive parallel web map/crawling infrastructure on top of an RDMBS -- particularly with multiple datacenters and high latency links between these datacenters: it may be feasible for an enterprise/intranet crawler, but not for something at the scale of Yahoo or Google search (both of which build up their datasets/indices using map/reduce and then distribute these indices to search nodes for low latency querying via more traditional approaches).
Not if it's not sucking up giant amounts of your time (and if you're enjoying working on it). People will still be interested. Just perhaps not as many ;-)
Well, he's right. We are a perl shop, we have tens of thousands of lines of maintainable code, we love the language, but we are almost ashamed to say it.

I think the perl community did contribute to this with all the dithering about perl6. Perl6 sucked a lot of perl brains out of the language and what was the higherst profile outcome? Parrot running Python. Hurrah.
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