skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting. Would you consider yourself an introvert or an extrovert, in general? I am an introvert and when I did 10 days of silence and meditation, the lack of social interaction was the easiest part for me. In fact, I think it made the whole experience easier for me because it alleviated the pressure to interact with people. I had none of the experiences you mentioned. And I was by no means an experienced meditator.

One thing I've always been really curious about is how an experienced meditator like a Buddhist monk would deal with forced solitary confinement. I think they would probably do much better than the average, untrained person. Now that would be a really interesting experiment.
Amazon keeps adding really great features to AWS, but the technology that makes companies like Heroku interesting is being able to use them without caring how any of it works.
amazons offering adds a pricing model to this space. if anything, i think amazons move into this space, although certainly anticipated, validates those that are also competing here. others who wish to compete know the price/value proposition they need to meet in order to have a chance.

http://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/
in France
blimey, I forgot about that, my friend __20h__ will be annoyed considering the channel I hang out in irc is called #gopher and we promote gopher uri's in the title!!
The only trouble I've run into with web.py is its extremely poor documentation.
State-funded doesn't mean state-run. On it's face, I agree that government being remotely associated with media is a bad thing. The fact of the matter is, though, that the quality of reporting that comes out of publicly-funded news organizations generally exceeds that of their private counterparts.

BBC news is one example (corporate alternatives? Telegraph/Daily mail). In the US, the only good national source of news on television is the News Hour on PBS. Frontline, as dramatic as it is, is much more palatable and thorough than its corporate investigative-journalist counterparts. Similarly, Public radio stands alone as a good source of news and commentary.

Many European countries have followed the model of the BBC, with very good results. Holland (where I'm living) has an interesting model where public broadcasting organizations make tv/radio programs, and those organizations are allocated money and airtime by the government based on their membership/viewer numbers.

Just because there are conflict-of-interest problems with public (government) money funding the press doesn't mean that there aren't equally serious conflict-of-interest problems between private (commercial) money doing the same.
Ptolemy is an academic project work looking at. From this perspective, its an attempt to incorporate some of the advantages of 'real' programming into a visual environment. http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/ptolemyII/ptIIlatest/
Not necessarily at odds. Hacker's Diet is about how one individual can get a substantial weight loss in a short time, and keep it with maintenance. This article is about long time effects of a certain diet. They don't contradict.
According to the documentation, Auto Scaling is based on input from CloudWatch (see the dimensions parameter):
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AutoScaling/latest/Develop...

re: trusting Amazon to scale, as they say in the release notes, they provide a detailed audit of scaling activity. After all the work Amazon has done to help their customers, I doubt they're interested in grabbing a little cash from inappropriate scaling.
Facebook like multi Toggle Comment Box with jQuery and PHP.
Implement Facebook like toggle comment box for every updated wall. I had designed a simple example it contains of very simple jQuery and PHP code.
Interesting article. The only question I have: Atkins diet exists for some time. If so, then why hasn't it been a wild success? I know it works very well short time, but I also know no diet, including Atkins, managed to do well long term (2+ years). Except fringe cases of people who dedicate half of their life to weight maintenance, specific diets tend to hurt more then help.

Also I'd like some specific opinion on rice. It's carb, but I haven't yet seen a fat Japanese.

Anyways, one thing is worth taking from all this: don't mix carbs with rich meals. A cake should be fine by itself, but fries with steak not so much.
The day someone comes up with solid evidence that they are using the system to skim money off unsuspecting customers is Amazon's last day as a hosting company.

Trust of a web host is of paramount importance. I know a lot of people who stuck with more expensive hosts just because they trust them and have a good working relationship with them.
I Agree. But what's so special about this? Any startup must think about the defendability of its idea. Completing very obvious gaps in the Amazon-offering is surely hardly defendable.
I started with one free private repository on bitbucket. After I started a second venture last week I signed up for their basic account ($5, 5 private repositories, 500GB). I use both git and mercurial, so I could just as well have signed up with github.com.

The reason for choosing bitbucket? Stability and speed. I've encountered 50+ error pages on github and on several occasions their servers were down when I needed access to some code. I also feel their site it a little slow at times (it was pretty snappy in their invite only beta days though). Bitbucket on the other hand have never failed me (user for ~1 year) and the UI is very responsive.
Couch, laptop in lap, and Norwegian soap operas in the background.
I was able to sign up my existing contracting clients to my new product in a sort of paid private beta. That covers the business expenses 4-5 times over while I finish the product and can really push with sales, and other than that I live at home with the parents - gives me a nice runway, and I'll probably give my parents some profit share / equity for their support :)
How can you use Online Bingo as Your Secondary Source of Income?
In this twenty first century many changes have taken place in the lifestyle of the people that has not only increased the facilities but has also increased the expenditure of the people due to which they require an extra source of income to maintain a balanced budget. Nowadays the best source of earning extra income is present within your house where you can sit in front of your computer .
If you already know PHP then go with Codeigniter MVC framework. It runs fast, very straightfoward, and the documentation is superb.
Any hacker ought to be able to set up git, it's so simple. I might consider recommending github if someone doesn't have a server somewhere, but aside from that, it's just too simple to set up.

svn isn't really that much harder.
Unfortunately it is for many people. Thankfully we have the unfollow button for those that feel the need to organise every facet of their life via twitter.
Linux, there's another error
> It's happening without artists' consent as we speak.

No, that's not "distribution". Suppose I own a shop in a lawless city where police are known not to enforce property rights. I place my fruit on baskets just outside the shop, and a significant amount of people steal fruit from the front of my shop. I think you'll agree that it would be trite to call this "distribution", for the simple reason that I'm not in control of the distribution.

> The hard parts are marketing and monetization. It's possible that someone might come around and fix those problems if the record labels weren't holding it back.

While I agree that marketing is "hard", I don't think it's "the problem". The problem is monetization: first, there is rampant piracy, and this canibalizes sales in both the physical and digital domains, and second, average prices in the digital domain are much lower than CDs. The first problem can be solved -- though it's doubtful that the average consumer will like the solution because the end result will be for his net wealth or time to diminish! -- through a mixture of carrot (hulu.com, Spotify, and iTunes come to mind) and stick (the three strikes law in France comes to mind). The second problem is not so much a problem as a new reality. The equilibrium price of music is probably somewhat above its current price (due to the effect of piracy and the "everything for free" culture prevalent online in the last ten years [which appears, to my mind, to be drawing to a close]), but it is certainly below CD prices. In addition, buying patterns have changed and products like iTunes make it easy to purchase individual tracks, further eroding revenue for the record companies. I don't think this is a trend you can reverse, because any attempt to restrict the buyer to purchasing the entire album will be met with increased piracy. Record companies will have to, and are, adjusting to this by emphasizing other revenue streams, e.g. merchandising, 360 degree contracts, licensing revenue maximization, etc.
this guy wins... but ill throw mine in for good measure...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9864615@N06/756229467/
Unscrupulousness is easier if the other party is complicit: much more profitable to make people want to lower the thresholds before spinning up a new server ("We recommend setting the trigger when your CPU load is 0.1 and disk iops is 10/s") versus the gauche act of the visible rip-off.
Experiences from India's recent election
Does auto scaling mean my instance will grow in ram/cpu/other resources or i'll be just given more new instances?
I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. I'm talking about a real-time monitor of all of CPU, RAM, Bandwidth, Load average and Disk I/O (you can show even more or less) that sits in the menu bar.

Windows only shows CPU like that, and it works really badly because if your CPU spikes to 100% it momentarily stops updating. There's simply no comparison between the two.
Browser, pdf and chm viewers, IM.

Nokia E90

Dell D830 (1920x1200), last Ubuntu x86_64/Fedora-development i586 (for Wine).
Ask HN: where do you draw the patent research line?
[Clarification: In all of the below, I'm talking about patent-checking to guard against infringement of others' patents, rather than protecting my own stuff]

When you've got an idea you like and believe in, how much time should you dedicate to patent research before getting into proper planning, coding and all the rest of the fun stuff?

a) Lots, be exhaustive

b) Some [any estimates of how much?]

c) None, just get it out there

I ask because a couple of years ago, for a startup that didn't make it to market (for a reason totally unconnected with patents), I spent the best part of two soul-destroying months poring over lots and lots of chunky patent documents, looking for things that might block what we were trying to do.

After all that time, an IP lawyer friend of mine said (in more or less these words) 'Just get it out there and see if anyone complains, then deal with it'. I'm operating in the UK, too, which seems to have a more favourable (for me) view of the ridiculousness of [edit] some [/edit] software patents, too, in the sense that they're harder to enforce over here, I gather. So in the end, we just went ahead (but then got sunk by another issue, but that's a different story, dammit.)

So, I was just wondering what the HN community thinks about it all. Did you spend ages poring over patents before cutting any code, too?
> For instance, suppose I am a corn farmer in Iowa. Derivatives allow me to buy the option of selling X bushels of corn at a specified price Y, on day Z. Hence, I have a guaranteed revenue at some point in the future.

Hm. Firstly, I do not think that is what "derivative" means, leastwise in common economic parlance. Derivatives would be products to other parties based on the various futures/options/insurances/promises-to-buy schemes.

> Thus, I can allocate my capital more efficiently because uncertanty has been reduced. Wealth is created.

Well, no, you have successfully severed your production from even that most tenuous of connections to reality which is supply and demand, and created money where none should exist (naturally it is arguable that the s&d ratio would be different and there would exist wealth if the financial sector was not mired in these schemes to begin with.)
I wasn't particularly interested in the article, but do love the title!
how was iTunes not built around a user base who wanted to listen to music? and therefore generally bought CDs? and therefore the evolution of their wallets is towards iTunes in the future?
for what reason? to sell what?
Dear American Airlines...
I don't think it's accurate to assume that all start ups have absolutely no money--my fulltime job came about due to part time work with friends after hours--when they raised just enough cash to pay salaries I came aboard. I'd still consider it a start up.
Same for IRC. All users from the channels I joined are on the contact list.
It means new instances.
Greedy (IT) Algorithms
I'd go for (c).

If people sue you for infringement of an obscure patent, they'll only do it if they think you're successful enough to be worth suing. Even then, you win (as in, you've managed to build a successful product).

From the protection side, imho, if you have to rely on patents to protect your business, you're probably doing it wrong.
Wolframsbeta.com - ask mom for washing
The atomic number of molybdenum - or simply my age: I just asked this piece of fun for my age and I was buffled because it answers me - 42. Correct! LOL ok, then I found out after reading the progress bar.
But that's not all. You are breaking the law.

As a publicly traded corporation, it is your duty to realize the maximum shareholder value possible.

Yeah, somehow I don't think that counts as "breaking the law".
Back in my research days I was going to apply for a certain patent, and spoke to a lawyer at the university about monetizing it. He ended up telling me that it can actually be dangerous to be too exhaustive in your research. You want to do a general search of a few databases of your general idea, but if you're very concerned about the idea you'll need to sanitize it by have someone else look and inform you if they find anything that's specifically applies to you.

If you find something that might apply to you, and it could be shown that you knew of the patent before you started (e.g. you told potential investors "There are only a few patents that could hold us up, like...[blah]...but we're confident it doesn't apply to us" and continued to try to monetize it, you could be up for punitive damages. Painful indeed.

Have a knowledgeable friend who you trust and would look out for you do the searching. They'll probably put in just the right amount of time - quite a bit, because they care about you, but not so much that it would impact them too much - and you're free to claim ignorance if anything comes up later.

If anyone knows anything wrong with this advice, it would be great to knock some sense into me at this point!
The Death of Richard Dawkins: A short story by Steve Yegge
IRC support is great, I can finally ditch Colloquy. I consider Twitter to be asynchronous, so I still use a separate application for that.
I believe mine will change the world. Fashion suicide will be the thing of the past.
Most linguists think it’s Just Not Done to say that a speaker population is evolving its own language out of existence

ESR == Steve Sailer

No matter what he's writing about there will always be a mention of how he can see situations more clearly than other people, but only because he's fearless in the face of the overbearing political correctness to which other people succumb.

He's just so unafraid of thinking "taboo" thoughts.
... whereas text is rendered as text, is his point.
But I understand the original explanation. It's all Mathematica, so it makes sense to let Mathematica format it and then spit it out as images.
I'm still not exactly sure how they managed to turn subprimes into AAAs either but from what I've been able to understand the rating isn't determined by the type or amount of the loans but the perceived risk in it. It's like your credit rating. It doesn't matter how much you have out in credit but how you are determined as a risk. Someone with 10k in debt but a credit score of 780 is going to find it much easier than someone with no debt and no credit score. You are a known quantity, there is a number slapped on your file. The other guy is an unknown quantity, he doesn't have a history of payments so they perceive him as a lot riskier.

The mortgage bundles work the same way. The banks told the agencies that there are a certain quantity of A loans, B loans, and C loans. Based on that information the bundles were given a rating.

Well what happened is those A loans turned into D loans when they were unable to make payments. Then as the investors started asking for more information they found some people weren't being honest. Now the bank is stuck with these shitty assets and they are unable to lend money because it's tied up in junk.

All of this is just my opinion as a financial outsider.
So somehow he thinks that because he had problems using their site - a website many people manage to navigate each day - they should treat it as a "pandemic emergency" and change many aspects of their business because of it?

Don't get me wrong, their site could be much better, but Curtis doesn't seem to have much sense of how things work in that place we like to call the "real world".
#1 (rapid evolution) is not a sign of language dying, it is a sign of language living. Only dead languages don't evolve.

#2 and #3 are true, not sure if they are a sign of death. As a (Danish) kid I found Norwegian (bokmål) far easier to read than Danish.

#4: I don't believe the ads are significant, and certainly not English street signs in areas a tourist may visit.

However, the last example is what Danish linguists consider the greatest threat to the language: Domain loss. Danish is really to small a language for specialized domains. When I write about my work, I use English, as the majority of people who might potentially be interested are from outside Denmark, and those Danes that might be interested can all read English. A generation ago similar texts would likely be in Danish, but a generation ago there was far less international collaboration.

[ Domain loss in Denmark is nothing new, Latin, French and German have all been dominating various domains earlier. The German dominance was far greater than English today, before the rise of nationalism Danish was merely a peasant language, and even for the peasants German words replaced Danish to a large degree. ]
Hey, that article had pretty bad usability itself. I skimmed, was unable to find the point through the hyperbole quickly and closed the tab.

EDIT: just to be clear, the article's been updated and this no longer applies.
That would be the wonderful sci-fi solution, it would seem, but I don't think the technology (or even the theory) is there yet.
i agree that the entire decline couldn't have been in architects, but remain mystified as to how (someone would conclude) this implies the _majority_ wasn't in architects
I actually binded it to Ctrl-Alt-(Left/Right) instead of the default, I think comes from the days I was a Enlightenment E16 user.

Also binded the change desktop to the Mouse's (Previous/Forward page buttons that's usually reserved for browser access). This came to be because at one point several years ago, I couldn't get Firefox to accept those buttons... but now I cannot live without it.
Just FYI, here's the link for making a poll: http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
I'm intrigued by your comment that German dominance was far greater than English, for some reason I don't think that's true. Could you expand upon this?
As Alaska Glaciers Melt, It’s Land That’s Rising
"Free rent (thanks sis!) and a small savings since I was laid off. I keep a vestigial social life and cook at home. This has been since January."

Thats plain crazy, wont believe if i tell you that , i have a sis, and have got small savings, was laid off sometime back, and i keep a vestigial social life..

but im hating this
Actually, if you would've suppressed your desire to quickly jump back here and make a snarky remark, you would've found that the redesign he offered is worlds better, both from an aesthetic and usability standpoint.

You'd think a company, especially in the airline market and one whose profits probably rely significantly on online ticket sales, would make it a priority to invest time and money, a trivial amount really to them, into making sure the online experience is as best as it can be.
"Hello, you are stupid and I hate you, therefore you should let me consult for you"

I'd be surprised if this works. Typically being nice to potential customers should be a more promising approach.
I could. Is your filesize 11? Maybe your editor added a newline character.

C:\>ls -l blah2.txt
-rwx------+ 1 shrughes ???????? 11 May 18 06:39 blah2.txt
C:\>cat blah2.txt
1 collision
C:\>openssl dgst -sha1 blah2.txt
SHA1(../blah2.txt)= 260bad88a9bf718be7ac56ab10db83682e043f5e
Ah, thanks. In a way, it's less about the polling and more about the discussion, but I'll bookmark it for the future :o)
I have been told that German almost made it as the official language of the entire USA when the constitution was set up. The legend says it lost to English for a few votes, but that poll apparently didn't take place.

In any case: "On January 13, 1795, Congress considered a proposal, not to give German any official status, but merely to print the federal laws in German as well as English"

See this: http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/ess...
im *not hating this...was a mistake
Disclaimer: AA is one of my favorite companies to deal with, so perhaps I am being too nice to them.

FWIW, I think this is BS. AA's website is not wonderful, but it's not hard to use. I book about 50,000 miles worth of travel a year there, and each trip only takes me a few minutes. My only complaint is that it won't remember my password.

He also complains about the business model, with "ruby, sapphire, and emerald" and "economy, business, and first" classes. This is how the legacy carriers work. They have three-class longhaul flights, and yes, you have to pick which class of service you want. They are also a member of an airline alliance, complicating things a bit ("ruby, sapphire, and emerald" are not AA's elite status, but rather the elite statuses that are recognized by oneworld, the alliance they're in). (He neglects to mention AA's own elite levels, which is odd -- the only place that you see notes about status is during seat selection, and they use AA's terms for the status [Gold, Plat, Exec Plat], not the oneworld terms.)

This complexity is why I fly AA nearly exclusively. Since I fly them a lot, I get various privileges (free domestic upgrades, lounge access when travelling internationally, all the BS fees waived, etc.). The complexity that being a member of an airline alliance entails means that I get to earn miles (and status) by flying BA in Europe, JAL to Japan, etc. When I have enough miles, I can redeem them for something worthwhile, like a $14,000 first-class ticket. (On the "less-complex" carriers, the best thing you can get with "miles" is a domestic economy ticket. "Yay.")

Anyway, I don't think this guy knows much about flying. Perhaps AA's website could better educate him... but most of these things have nothing to do with the webiste. If you don't care about the specific benefits of flying AA, just use a fare comparison site and pick the lowest fare. If you do care about AA's benefits, read the documentation on their site. Either way, I don't think the website or the legacy-carrier business model is harming the shareholders.
I get what you're saying, yeah. I'm not looking to protect my stuff via a patent (would rather just have a chunky customer base and be done with it), but wouldn't want to be blocked by someone else with a nitpicky patent about, say, videoconferencing or the like
How long before they start offering the full commodity application stacks? LAMP is the same on every shared host.