skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess the Facebook's main goal it's not to provide links to external sites where the real information is.

Also, Facebook's bar does not pretend to be a URL shortener to get links and increase it's own traffic.
Shouldn't he wait until the cost comes down and settles a bit before he bothers writing a whole screed about the expense? It's like decrying the HDTV as not worth the money -- they're over $10,000 each! Or, they were, a few years ago.
Not even close. The bandwidths of RAM vs. SSDs differ by a couple orders of magnitude.
Digg can avoid pissing people off with this by adding their own framebuster. If the frameset's HTTP referrer is Digg, then the DiggBar is a potentially useful toolbar. If the referrer is something else, it should redirect to the original page.
He does it in seconds.

http://www.theforgottentechnology.com/newpage3

Scroll down to the "Egyptian Hoist" video.

Bigger blocks just need longer ramps.
"I came to the conclusion that some genuine, sincere Christians were genuinely and sincerely delusional. "

Seems like this is something you could say about humans in general.

My feeling is that if religion is a drug, then atheism is as well. They are both a belief that depends on faith.
"Trait Transfer" is an interesting idea, one that had not particurly occured to me in my 45 years on Earth. I'm gonna work on that one.
I had to change some code on some of our data acquisition system while we were flying on NASA's KC-135 (also known as the vomit comet) back in the early 90's. Some water condensation was dripping from the ceiling on the keyboard while the other experimenters nearby were barfing their brains out. I've been in more optimal situations.
Programming language popularity
There's several things on the list that aren't even easter eggs (or real).
Well, obviously the price of SSDs will change in the future, but the question is whether they are a good idea for server workloads now, not in 2 or 3 years.
I wrote a map mash-up of CraigsList ads recently: http://www.trailbehind.com/housing_map
No. People have to stop saying this. Atheism does not depend on faith. It is a falsifiable hypothesis that fails if anyone presents repeatable, concrete evidence that a higher power exists. After millenia of trying, the overwhelming evidence is in support of atheism. Before science, religion was seen as an explanation for lots of things -- as science has explained more and more, religion has been forced into increasingly smaller corners for explicative power. Atheism doesn't take anything on faith -- that's the point.

Religion is not falsifiable, which makes it fundamentally different from atheism.
Well some issues related to politics, etc also affect hackers, and future hackers.
For example, the education system in some places lacks vision, making hackers feel restricted, like I do, overburdened with unrelated subjects of high credits under a CS degree. Otherwise I could've learnt things I wanted to, started projects that I wished to do, and C# app dev for a project we are doing wouldn't have taken 3 months, if we didn't have tests every other week and loads of assignments to do. I could have had time to experiment, learn and create so many things then.
I think such decisions and efforts to do such illogical things as abolishing use of computer and english would create more and more problems for those who wish to learn and make lives more comfortable by use technology.
I thought such things do matter a little bit and even this one.
But that's a circular argument. Programmers are in demand and also have wages artificially controlled by manipulating the supply. There's no reason the government - because they are the government - couldn't break the stranglehold of the AMA, it would be at least as much in the public interest as the H1B programme, if not a great deal more so.
This problem is not limited to the humanities. Academia in all fields depends on an army of young grad students and postdocs to staff the research trenches, many times more than there ever will be tenured positions for.

In fact it is more insiduous in the sciences, in that people think they are gaining marketable skills that they can fall on as a Plan B. For example many delude themselves that they can program, because they had to write a few scripts to manipulate data in their research career. They get weeded out at early stages for software engineering positions ("Have you ever used a version control system" is a Damoclean interview question).
Simple data analysis in R
Especially with the Intel X-25 at around $4.50 per GB and DDR2 running at $10 per GB - there just isn't much of a cost savings for completely disparate performance.
Stop downvoting this guy so much. This guy tried to make a joke and failed, but should it really cost him that much karma?
When I was a child, I was leafing through Parade when I came across "Ask Marilyn" and read about her having the "world's highest IQ."

Several Sundays later when I'd gotten the gist of the whole thing, I asked my mother: "but what does she do?" I was totally and utterly perplexed. Here was a woman smarter than Einstein and Hawking squandering away her intelligence on such downright silly matters. You don't need an IQ of 230 to write a newspaper column... you just don't.

It pissed me off then, but I never gave it much attention... Since then I've left the States and totally cast her out of mind. But when the topic comes up, I just shrug and guess that this is God's way of showing us that you don't need to be the world's most intelligent in order to accomplish something, because sometimes the biggest "geniuses" amongst us are the biggest idiots in reality.

An IQ like that applied to literally anything under the sun other than a newspaper column could yield huge benefits to humanity. It doesn't matter what - anything she likes. History, psychology, chemistry, physics, math, computers, English, philosophy, anything.

But she didn't. And that pisses me off like crazy. Because I don't have her IQ but I work day and night hoping to make this world a better place.... and there she is, showing off her IQ as if at the World Fair to make petty gains as a household celebrity, a freak of nature rather than one of the luckiest people on the planet.
NYU Student Conducts Most Adorable Robot Experiment Ever
How're you finding the culture of courant? Is it a place worth checking out for grad school for folks into cs theory + general mathy goodnes?
streeteasy.com in NYC
True, definitely true.
What the difference is, IMHO, that with iPhone and AppStore a single individual can develop something in relatively easy way and have a very good distribution channel. The toolchain is reasonable and Obj-C is fun (well, not fun like python but really funnier than Symbian C++, who tried it know what I mean).
Ovi Store (last time I checked) will not even accept app from individual doing development part-time, without having a company. So, for me and many many other it is a dead game.
Nokia does other very interesting things (N810 and maemo comes to mind) but Ovi store is a no brainer (at least for me). I'm talking as an european that had only Nokia phones in the last 15 years and uses an N95 as main phone (and an iPhone for apps and browsing).
If you are looking for short term housing Air Bed & Breakfast works pretty well. (www.airbnb.com) It is also a YCombinator company.
I don't know if this is an appropriate comment, but I am interested from which flavor of Christianity you've "deconverted."
Its a nice thought, and I feel where he's coming from, but it feels like one of those rants thats a bit in denial about human nature.
Blah blah blah whine whine whine. If you don't like it, get yourself a lobotomy.
I don't disagree with the author, but I do think he underestimates the beneficial effects of the drug to its users in that he fails to mention the often large social benefits that one can obtain by belonging to a church, especially in a world where contact with one's local community seems like it is becoming less common. The IRL social network that religion provides, in addition to its palliative effects, comprise the major sources of utility from religious belief.

And I think it does a good job of explaining the uphill battle that evangelical atheists have. In order to convert someone, you have to convince them that being correct on a technical metaphysical issue is worth the real costs that they will bear for abandoning their religion. It's not the most appealing sales proposition.

Religion has been around for as long as humans have. I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon. And despite the fact that I think it's wrong, I have serious doubts that the world would be a better place without it.

This is also the crux of the disagreement that I have with the self-proclaimed rationalists (see the blog Less Wrong for examples). Rationalists believe that what is true is also always beneficial, but I am not convinced that this is necessarily so. I find it easy to imagine a world where believing some false propositions was beneficial, and I suspect we may even live in such a world.
The change has to come to take the money and investment out to where it's happening. Innovation is spreading everywhere, yet investment is local, which means North America and (parts of) Europe. And this isn't necessary anymore. The trick isn't to find a way to bring the people to the money, it's a way to bring the money to the people. Most founders will do anything for their startup, but even then, asking someone to move countries is a big request. Americans often think that people would cut off their arm for a US passport; it's simply not true. My opinion is that more of the hard problems are being worked on outside the US than in it, and that means that this investment migration is inevitable.
Tell HN: I didn't get a job due to a failed startup on my resume
My startup went down the pan due to lack of money (what's new?) I was always told the expereince you get from a failed startup is a good thing. Well, a certain large software company doesn't seem to think so. Apparently, "as an entrepeneur you are obviously a free spirit, not the kind of person that settles well in a normal job, we would never hire people with a failed startup on their resume".

Thanks HN. You lied to me about the true cost of a failed startup.
That's problem #1 in the current format of humanities graduate education. The assistantships train students to teach classes and grade papers, and the research and dissertation process teach students how to get an academic paper published. It's optimized for generating new professors (tenure-track or otherwise), and there's not much demand to tailor it in other directions since the dream career of most humanities grad students is being a tenured professor. This is less of a problem in subject areas where entering students already have a different career in mind, e.g. engineering.

I won't speculate what those alternative careers could be, but in other improbable fields that attempt to reassert their relevance, applied career paths have a tendency to pop out and eventually be reincorporated into academia as a new, related discipline. For example, psychology has already forked and merged a few times.
Here was a woman smarter than Einstein and Hawking

Oh hell no. She just tests well. The best candidate for "highest g-factor in the history of time" is probably John von Neumann.
I don't think it's anything so serious as God's way of showing us anything. IQ tests don't measure intelligence perfectly, especially at the higher ranges. If millions of people take IQ tests, there will be a few who are super-good at whatever they do measure. Occam's razor says she is one of them.

I remember taking an official IQ test in 5th or 6th grade. One of the questions was how many feet there were in a mile. I kid you not. It happened that I was a runner, so I knew a lap around the track was 440 yards. 440 x 4 = 1760, 1760 x 3 = 5280. But even at the time I remember thinking, how could intelligence possibly depend on that kind of random domain knowledge?
When I'm coding something challenging, I have trouble keeping it clear in my head. I have to break things down into sections and try to extract the core problem from the noise - but that's not enough. I then have to build it in stages, adding a layer at a time of complexity. Sometimes I had the wrong model, and have to go back. I do discover things, and see more as I go. So now I can solve problems that I'm not smart enough to solve: a self-transcendence.

I sometimes think someone smarter than me could just see* this. It's a frustrating and discouraging thought. Like you, my only answer is: but they're not*.
Top iPhone Features for the Enterprise
I guess I touched a nerve there.
Much of science is still theory, and theories are a very valuable way to help explain things, but they are not 'overwhelming evidence'. Also, this thinking that religion has been forced into a corner is dependent upon the crowd you are a part of (crowd behavior). The opposite crowd might have you thinking the opposite. If an atheist believes without faith, then that means that they are completely sure of everything. Another term for this is close-mindedness.
Errol Morris interview with the "smartest man in the world."

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ak5Lr3qkW0&feature=relat...

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mfbUhs2PVY&feature=relat...

Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA0gjyXG5O0

(Good interview, but the best one Errol Morris did with his tv series was the one with the mob lawyer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLEe496IS1o And the movie Fog of War, of course.)
FAIL: On track in your career as a software engineer, but with a couple of years of lost earnings.

You might be -2 years earnings but you'll gain equivalent to +4 years experience, just from the extra hours you'll put in, maybe even more. It's still a net win.
Exactly what one would expect from the person who brings us http://www.simplyhappynews.com/ :)

Sorry - I'm not taking the piss - really, I'm not. When I read your comment, my first thought was, "How Mary Poppins!" I then clicked on your profile and saw "simplyhappynews.com" and laughed out loud at the coincidence.
OLTP workloads will certainly be accelerated by SSDs. They tend to involve a lot of random reads/writes, and the former in particular are massively accelerated by SSDs. The latter seem to be getting better as the technology matures. I think there is a question mark over SSD durability during very large quantities of random writes - they erase/rewrite a whole load of data for each small change, so those figures about the amount of data you can write to the disk before it fails might be approached unexpectedly rapidly.

Anyway, basically, yes, SSDs are ideal for OLTP, and will likely be fast enough that you can cut back on denormalisation significantly. The trading of the features of traditional RDBMSs (ACID vs BASE, etc) is often an artifact of database distribution, however, and that won't change with the introduction of SSDs. OLTP databases that are small enough to fit on one of today's SSDs shouldn't really be a problem for a half-decent existing relational DBMS anyway.

Stonebraker was actually involved in a paper that talks about OLTP in main memory, and I would commend that to you: http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/vldb07hstore.pdf . Main memory has some similar-ish characteristics to SSDs (lowish latency, high transfer rate), so it might be of interest.

Sorry if this post is a bit confused, just getting it in before I fall asleep ;).
because society views them (correctly or otherwise; mostly otherwise, I believe) as naive pansies.

It doesn't matter what society views them as. If supply exceeds demand, prices will bottom out. And that's not even grad school, it's Econ 101.
>I remember taking an official IQ test in 5th or 6th grade.

There is still inherent cultural bias in IQ tests, but it's definitely not that bad anymore. There's also a big difference between group IQ tests, which some states administer alongside achievement tests in elementary school and are basically completely worthless for measuring anything at all, and actual IQ tests, done one on one with a psychologist.

Normal IQ tests don't measure very high, to be certified with a 200+ IQ you need to take a test that looks more like a Putnam Competition test than anything else.
The test I took was the type done one on one with a psychologist.
>My feeling is that if religion is a drug, then atheism is as well.

Atheism isn't a drug because it doesn't provide any comfort.

Christianity: Your mother passed away last night, son. Someday you'll see her again in heaven.

Atheism: Your mother passed away last night, son. Someday you'll join her in a hole in the ground.
We can Collaborate. I have a platform I will open for you to promote the truth. Contact me at aeonpi.com
She is not a "genius" in how I use the term.

Abnormally high IQ scores, by their nature, often speak of a brain too general to be of much use. “Effectively,” said Rust, “you are mastering far too many things.”

Broadness, though, is what Savant craves. “Reading all about these subjects,” she says of her work, “I am becoming amazingly informed to a superficial extent.”

I use "genius" to describe a person who has studied a particular area with a level of dedication, creativity and success such that they are orders of magnitude above even others in their field.
euwyn.com ? (via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=544074 )
These stories are so incredible they might be able to compile a real "Extreme Programming" book
housingmaps.com
Atheists do not believe. They lack belief in the assertions of theists. It is the burden of the theists to provide ample evidence to support their assertion that we all live under the watchful eye of an omnipotent God.
They said this to you at an on-site interview? How did you make it that far if they had that attitude?

About your last comment: take responsibility for your actions.
Atheism isn't a belief any more than fasting is a meal or a bare chest is a shirt. This argument rests on the misconception (bordering on a straw man) that atheism is the positive belief that there are no gods. That's not what atheism is. Atheism is simply the lack of belief in any gods. There is a difference between "I do not believe that God exists" (atheism) and "I do believe that God does not exist" (so-called "positive atheism").

Some atheists are positive atheists, but for most of us it's at best a suspicion or a working hypothesis, not a matter of absolute, infallible, unquestioned belief.

Even if we are to consider the belief that there are no gods, I would still question whether or not this belief depends on faith any more than the various beliefs that there are gods. If you study the history of philosophy you'll find a number of supposed "proofs" of the existence of God. There are also many arguments for the non-existence of God. It's a matter of argument and cautioned reasoning, not faith, whether or not to believe that God exists.

Faith is an epistemic position that the atheist does not share. Most atheists tend to acquire beliefs based upon evidence. Just like everyone else, an atheist goes home at night expecting that his house is where he left it that morning. But, just like everyone else, an atheist would be surprised to find that his house had burned down. Yet, after some amount of emotional torment, the atheist would be forced to believe that his house was, in fact, no longer standing.

Contrast this with religious belief. A positive atheist, upon coming across some unquestionable evidence of God's existence, would be surprised but would be forced to accept what the evidence has shown. Someone of religious faith would come across unquestionable evidence that God did not exist and refuse to believe it. They would in fact rearrange their entire belief system simply to preserve their non-rational, privileged belief that God exists and will save them from eternal damnation in exchange for their faith.

Keep in mind, that is the ideal case. People of faith can be better empiricists than the demands of faith allow them to be, just as empiricists can be more dogmatic than the demands of empiricism allow them to be. But while most atheists consciously choose empiricism (and reject belief in God because there is no good evidence for it), people of faith consciously choose faith. This is the real difference. It's not about God, it's about how people choose to form their beliefs.

(OK--let's be more clear here. An atheist can still have faith in something else. For instance, most Buddhists are atheist because of their faith in the possibility of mystical enlightenment and so forth. The real difference isn't between religious people and atheists, but between religious people and secularists. Just as atheists can be religious, secularists can believe in God. Such secularists are known as "deists" and many of them did remarkable things, such as writing the Declaration of Independence.)
I took that IQ test in grade 3 and 6 (I live in Canada) and I scored in the 99th percentile. That means I have a "genius" level IQ. I'm not a great coder, but I can tell you that I also have trouble keeping things clear in my head, and I do exactly as you describe. Perhaps that skill of breaking down problems is what IQ is measuring?
An alternative form for the last section ("The other side: Scoring points by controlling the madness") is "Derek, what were you going to say?" This would be appropriate when Derek indicated a desire to speak but was interrupted by someone with a bigger ego.

When I find myself in this kind of conversation, though, I'll almost always go for "Start a side conversation if you can". See if the person next to you seems sympathetic to the idea and then start the conversation wherever you want.
Half a mile underground in a gold mine. While sitting on top of a lift cage, little stones bouncing off my hard hat while somebody leaned over the laptop to keep the water from dripping on it.
globrix.com in UK
Fred Wilson Talks About VC Basics and Future [video]
I just find as a woman with a fairly low voice (not one of those raucous ear-splitting types) the best way to succeed at these sorts of conversations is not to get involved in them in the first place.
Is developing for android similar/as hard as developing for symbian, or more on par with the iphone?
I had two reactions to this:

1.) "Yes! Maybe now I won't have to support IE6."

2.) "Fuck. That means I better fix the IE8 bugs in my software ASAP."
Wikileaks Posts secret ACTA Documents Revealing Copyright Enforcement Cooperation
Measure the gravitational constant like Cavendish did in 1798
This argument just doesn't hold. The atheist believes that the assertions of theists are incorrect and have faith that they are correct in that belief.
The mere fact that you have replied to my post says that you <i>do</li> feel the burden to explain your belief in atheism - which in turn reinforces that your belief is based on a faith.
There's a wonderful theory that sees Buddhism, Christianity and Islam as responses to changes in society brought about by new technology (IIRC)
But the point is that an atheist does not know and is not completely sure. Religion, on the other hand, tends to sell itself as having all the answers (except when it doesn't, then it's simply a matter of God's will). Atheists simply can't believe that religion has all the answers, there just is not any proof in that being the case.
It makes no sense that they double-escape < and >. They also replace every instance of < with > (wtf?)
The concept of intelligence quotient is subjects score divided by average score of people subjects age. This is a pretty ridiculous metric, and anyone can see that the younger you are the better chance you have of scoring a genius IQ.
Science still hasn't explained where the world came from. The idea that something just appeared just because is no more or less plausible, and has no more or less evidence than God, the Matrix or whatever. In such circumstances, if you make your position the default as you just did you automatically win.