skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My apologies for offending. DIY is "do it yourself". An enthusiast (like myself) would prefer to use OpenVPN or FreeSWAN instead of a Cisco ASA, would rather use iptables on a Linux box than a commodity firewall, would rather slap a wireless card into an OpenBSD machine rather than to buy a commodity access point, etc. This is cool and all, but it makes it harder for other folks to deal with. Let's say your on vacation and there is a problem with the wireless. If you had used a commodity access point, somebody could have just reset it, as opposed to have to log into the OpenBSD box and unload/load the kernel driver, or frobbed it with ifconfig, or whatever.
The Fallacy Of ReUse
I've been reading various things about Naggum that have appeared in the last few days. It's changed my view of him. For example, I wouldn't write "consummate intellectual bully" to describe him anymore. He was more subtle than that (though his language was not) and had a kind of integrity that bullies don't. I hadn't read enough of him to grok this, but recent posts by his intelligent admirers caused me to take a deeper look. Truly a fascinating character.

Online communication is a limited medium that is prone to feedback loops of escalating misunderstanding. It's easy to slip into thinking that one is talking to a computer rather than another human being because, in a way, one is. At that point, why bother with anything other than the intellectual satisfaction of formulating what you have to say in the sharpest, most absolute way possible? Many of us are prone to this. Naggum took it to an extreme. I still think there's something to criticize here, but perhaps not in terms like nasty, cruel, etc. It has more to do with dissociation (as when the cognitive apparatus becomes disconnected from emotional or other information). Which is another something many of us are prone to.

One other point about Erik Naggum that deserves a little more attention than it's gotten: during much of the time he was writing this stuff he was suffering physically pretty badly. That's not an excuse, but it does change my picture of what was going on there.
I've used every major relational database on the market, and views & stored-procedures being requirements are blanket generalizations that are arguable at best. Both of them are enterprise tools for working around stupid schemas and bad code.

Arguing that DBAs 'require' the complex features in the other relational database is like saying that Macs 'require' more complex interfaces so IT people can work with them.

Backwards, and wrong.
From what I'm reading, the question of whether there was an affiliation was what the panel considered, and they decided no, because whatever affiliation there was was simply to an organization that espoused intellectual property and copyright laws as they existed already.

In other words, you can't be forcibly recused from a copyright trial just because you believe copyright laws are valid in their strictest interpretation.
The term "Cloud computing" has been abused quite heavily but here's how I understand it:

Your use of an external service where your use of that service (e.g. storage, processing power etc.) is so small compared to the global use that you are able to scale up and down without affecting anyone and the system as a whole. You also only pay for the amounts of the service that you have used.
Collaborative Charity
OPEN SOURCE BED PROJECT?

We have the latest technologies when it comes to automobiles and other products, yet our bed is still using the same technology that's existed for thousands of years. Let's rethink our sleeping apparatus.

Here's my inventive thoughts on sleeping.

Why not use all the technology at our disposal to create the ultimate sleeping bed?

Here's the basic design:

1. The bed has a lid that closes over top (think coffin but roomier inside).

2. Bed has temperature control system to vent air and adjust to sleeping preferences.

3. Bed mattress has cooling pipes to control mattress temperatures.

4. Lot of control systems to monitor air temperature, mattress temperature and body temperature and keeps them all in check.

5. Integrated lighting in the dome of the bed is used for waking and mood setting

6. Bed sits on motorized incline to help with morning assist routines

The fun with this projects comes in setting up the control system for optimal sleep cycles. With the variable being temperature (air and mattress), light, sound, and bed angle.

Any takers?

Edit: additional note is this could be considered a "green" bed because it has a self contain heating/cooling system which is more efficient than heating/cooling your entire house. So at night, you can lower your overall energy requirements for hvac related bills.
Yeah. It's pretty much like MySQL all over, except this time they are doing something new which doesn't have any absolute, proven references out there, so you have to argue on a philosophical level why they are on the wrong track instead of citing absolute metrics.

The sad thing is that these people use MySQL of all things as a reference point as what a relational database can do, and hence to them it seems all reasonable.
A former spy picks forbidden fruit and sells health in the produce aisle
Probably because in 1904, there wasn't a standardized "investigate a popular eccentric's scientific claims" process enshrined in the bureaucracy.
With pattern matching, you actually end up being able to mostly do away with if and switch statements, so it's not completely as crazy as it sounds. OTOH, sometimes pattern matching involves a lot of "repeating yourself", where you have to retype the function name, and a bunch of arguments, and only one changes.
Charges against WHO and UN for Bioterrorism and Intent to Commit Mass Murder
China as the next big innovator?
My take on this is that if you're not interested in the subject enough to learn it on your own, then you'll probably never gain a deep understanding of it. That's not to say that a formal education is bad -- it will just never be a substitute for real personal motivation. If you have the motivation it takes to start learning a subject on your own, then I don't see any reason not to use every vector available to you to increase your knowledge, including college.

So, I don't think that a formal education is the biggest factor in one's ability to pursue interesting projects. However, there are some cases where a college degree could come in handy. At least in the initial stages of pursuing your dream you'll probably need a day job. Unfortunately, many employers dismiss out of hand resumes that do not meet their education requirements. Granted that employers that do so are probably not the best to work for, but sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do to pay the rent.
I agree with you that this casts doubt on the verdict, which doesn't do anybody any good.

Still, the appellate court's contention is that being affiliated with a copyright law related professional organization is different than being affiliated with a particular copyright holder. Copyright law is simply a branch of legal study, interest in which is not a contentious issue per se. Furthermore, court doesn't concern itself with the political discussion around law, but in the application of law as it stands.

I mean, I don't know where I personally stand in all this. But one thing is for sure, if the courts don't consider copyright law as contentious, a legislative body eventually will. Just look at the rise of the Pirate Party.
It was a metaphor, here I'll explain it. The singularity is something in the future. Some believe the singularity will be an entity smarter than humans, that can do things, including move, perhaps even move itself in time. Who knows? Thus the trotting use as an anthropomorphic description of singularity behavior.

Furthermore, as technology progresses, the date at which the singularity will arrive is getting closer and closer, thus the singularity is moving backward in time, from the future to the present.

So humanity and the singularity, in a plane beyond the space time continuum are moving toward each other, humanity moving forward through time, and the singularity moving backward through time.

It's just poetry. That's why jderick said to use your imagination.
Whatever he used his boss still wouldn't have understood it. The problem he's having is balancing programming time, with IT time. Something I do very poorly myself, but it's not hopeless.

The funny thing is I've been interrupted 3 times while writing this comment, it's ruined my flow and I forget what I was going to write.

Oh yea, I lock myself in an office and close the door when it's time to work on spurts of programming, otherwise I feel burnt out and nothing gets done. I've also got a boss who's capable of doing IT work. Having two of us helps entirely, maybe a $25k a year intern to ease the "my caps lock is broken!" off your plate could help.

But seriously, take your 20% time and don't answer the phone and use it to program. You need your focus time, and then come back and do the rest of your job.
> The worst thing is: the cool crowd doesn't even know what they are missing.

Actually, they do. A lot of the people interested in and writing code for these new databases are the ones who have seen first-hand the failures of the traditional DBA view of the world. If you look at where a lot of these projects are coming from and who are sponsoring them you will see that they are some of the companies that are at the leading edge of internet scaling and deployment. The advantage they have which you seem to ignore is that they can look back at the wrong turns in the development of the current crop of RDBMS and avoid those particular dead-ends.
Is the generic-ness meaningful on legal grounds, or just giving you better odds that no one will take it personally, panic, and call in the lawyers? I'm assuming the latter, since I imagine most litigation that arises in situations like this is more about trying to sweep it under the rug than an actual legal case.
It sounds like you're unhappy with your current job because you have two (or three) jobs. You need at least one other person to handle day-to-day tech support while you build and maintain the infrastructure. Maybe two people.

But your company is not going to pony up the money for that because it sounds like you're willing to do tech support during the day, then build the infrastructure for them for free, at night.

If you want to be happy at your job, then you need to explain that you're basically doing unpaid work, and that if they want to maintain the current level of service, you need at least one other person.
As much as I like to bash M$, this time M$ is not to blame... If anyone it's Farecast...
views & stored-procedures being requirements are blanket generalizations that are arguable at best.

I hate to break it to you, but for any complex data representation you will have to make abstractions to work with it efficiently and consistently.

Both of them are enterprise tools for working around stupid schemas and bad code.

There are more complex systems out there than your blog. It doesn't have to even be near enterprisey before having solid schemas and relations are indispensable for working reliable and efficiently with your data.

Arguing that DBAs 'require' the complex features in the other relational database is like saying that Macs 'require' more complex interfaces so IT people can work with them.

I've heard worse analogies and will let this one slide. However your argument, in its essence, basically boils down to "lets just ditch databases, all their optimization features and just use unrelational, standalone files as records". You promote simplicity over rigidness and predictability, which is required for any processing and optimization.

If you for a second believe this naivé approach to data-access is going to give you better results in any non-trivial case, I'll challenge you to prove it. As for any trivial case: Performance doesn't matter, you might as well use XML.
I really like Kayak and the team that runs that company, I've had several interactions with them, all of them positive. And I wish them the best in resolving this.

(One of these interactions was suggesting that they they make CNAME so that the URL "moc.kayak.com" would resolve, so they did.)
Small companies and large companies have entirely different time/money tradeoffs and it can be hard to make the transition. At my previous employer it was fine to spend a week making something work by cobbling together existing projects with some glue code. It was fun and I learned a lot.

So when I started this job (working with large companies) helping out with a co-worker's task I started trying to solve a particular problem the skinflint way, ok we can repurpose this box here to serve a filesystem while the other box is down for the vendor to swap the firmware and then...

My co worker (rightly) pre-empted me and recommended $20,000 of SAN equipment to replace the problematic device.

Neither way is better in the absolute, it's a question of what variable you're optimizing for.
I think if I was going to descend into this madness, tarpipe looks like the best thing out there for it: http://tarpipe.com/
Building products is like preparing a meal
Ask HN: Where do you get your design inspiration?
What blogs, websites, and designers influence your style? Let's not just limit this to web design but also include mobile, desktop (and maybe even interior?) design.

I'll start it off with the obvious: http://www.smashingmagazine.com

I also love the design of many indie Mac software developers. ripitapp.com & realmacsoftware.com/littlesnapper are two examples.
It is new, I'll give you that. I'm not sure who you mean by "these people". CouchDB is a document database not a relational database. Comparisons are made mostly to help folks understand the differences not to argue superiority. One argument is that a schema-less approach solves the issue of dealing with schema evolution. Having worked with O-R mapping issues for years as well as OODBs and persistent heaps and so forth I think document databases provide a fresh look. The technology choices of JSON over HTTP, Javascript and Erlang all the way down are also very compelling. It strikes me as just good timing. YMMV
"Management Approach: 15 pages"

Yikes. My life has been a lot better since I stopped writing these type of proposals (and business is doing just fine). What a waste of time. The whole RFP process is broken.
If Microsoft owns Farecast, they are in fact ultimately responsible. That's what ownership means.
IBM researcher solves longstanding cryptographic challenge
unbiased was the wrong word for me to use. Unaffiliated was what I should have said (even that is bad: all I mean is one with no connections full stop :D)
I couldn't agree more. I've been using relational dbs my entire career and these attempts at new ideas I find refreshing.
NPR will have to use other sources to verify the information people on the internet submit. They can build it so that the submitted information isn't publicly available until it's verified.

Perhaps if they get multiple people suggesting that a particular person is this person, then that may be a good indicator.
This is of course anecdotal, but a few years back I did the polyphasic experience, and I can confirm that dreaming consistently occurs during those 20 minute naps, which strongly suggests REM sleep. In fact, those dreams were some of the best and most vivid dreams I've ever had, presumably because you're never more than 20 minutes away from consciousness, so you remember the dreams clearly, and the dreams are strongly correlated to your mental state going into the nap.

Everyone should try the polyphasic experience for at least a few months of one's life. It radically alters the way you think about time.
http://delicious.com/popular/inspiration
The Systemic Risk of Venture Capital
Agreed, I also don't see much advantage in word processing or spreadsheets on the cloud.

The only thing I can think of is some light-weight collaboration, but more involved collaboration is better done using version control anyway. This is outweighed by the disadvantages of having to deal with clunky Javascript/Flash apps and slow internet connsections.

There are many cool things to be done on the cloud, but Office-style apps just don't seem to be a good example.
Aside from claustrophobes, this might work alright. But it would require a lot of material, and it would have to look good, because people like beds that are made out of nice looking wood. And it's expensive building a roomy king-size coffin out of maple ;)
why easier in NYC? because of the 24/7 nature of the city or something else?
Google App Engine file limit increased to 3000
MT is not a hybrid Perl/PHP product. You can run MT just fine without having PHP installed.

The PHP stuff is, AFAICT, another way to write MT plugins.
Jay Cutler (Mr. Olympia 2006, 2007) is reported to sleep no longer than 3 hours at a time with his weight-lifting regimen. It's not polyphasic, but it's entirely possible to build muscle with a reduced sleep schedule.

Old FHM Article http://forum.bodybuilding.com/archive/index.php/t-3330281.ht...

Source found Googling http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0KFY/is_3_22/ai_n6108... (bottom of page)
Sometimes there's only so many ways to skin a cat, art is very much an influential process and converging ideas are common. I can dig up PRINT and INTERACTIVE magazines from the 90-00's and show you plenty of designs that have been "copied" a million times over.

http://images.colinanawaty.com/screenshots/5b629b77aa8a247c3...

If Kayak thinks their design is so original, maybe they should check out eBay's two column layout; filters on the left, content in the middle. Unless MS copied code and a VERYYYY unique approach to UI, this is a weak case that should be thrown out, IMO. Notice too that the screenshot in the WIRED article uses the EXACT same search data so it's even more suggestive that Microsoft copied Kayak. Controversy brings eye balls...
http://www.viget.com/inspire
And that flexibility comes at a direct cost to ease of use.
Particularly on a mobile with limited battery life.

And can we stop with the adobe marketing bullet-point? Do real people actually -care- if they get flash on their phone?

IME what people are looking for is support of video sites that aren't youtube.

But shouldn't we be calling on those sites to support vanilla h264 and html 5 rather than h264-wrapped-in-proprietary-inefficient-mess?

Why call on -phones- to destroy our batteries trying to make that proprietary inefficient mess run acceptably?
Ask HN:  When you sell a server-based iPhone app, how long should it work for?
How long are you expected to keep the server-side working?

What if the app is still functional but with reduced functionality without the server-side working properly?
Not Every Child Is Secretly a Genius
Also: Sorry, I thought the topic was PC gaming?

EDIT: Specifically my L4D comment was in response to: "A relic from the time when PC gaming was exciting and relevant."
Help me understand: is it a terrible problem to design one website so that it looks similar to another website, but not a terrible problem to reproduce a copyrighted musical recording and share it with your friends? I'm trying to figure out what the general principle of fairness (or morality) is here.
Five Techniques That Make You Powerful, Persuasive, & Influential
there seems to be no scientific evidence that this works at all

Do you know if there has been a serious scientific study of this technique? Otherwise, you're being a bit disingenuous in subtly applying the "unscientific" label. The set of things that are true is much larger than the set of true things that have been proven scientifically.
You can answer your own question by spending a few minutes reading this comments page.
Although they have reached the limit of the Swedish system, they are continuing to escalate their case by taking it to the European Court of Human Rights. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/06/pirate-bay-r...
My favorite analogy: Raising kids. Quit your day job and raise your kid, putting all your energy into them. When you're out of money 6 months later, you still have a 6 month old kid. Maybe they can walk a little sooner than their peers, but you can't artificially grow them into a teenager. The same is true with growing a user/customer base. Some things just take time.

I wish I could quit my job for 1 month while I build the core technology, then get my job back while I build the userbase. Since that's usually not an option, I'll spend 3-4 months of spare time building the technology while I keep my job, then grow it organically over time.
"Christopher J. Ferguson holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Central Florida and also trained at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. He has been active in publishing research papers on violent and aggressive behavior in peer-reviewed journals and scholarly books and has done clinical work with adults and juveniles in correctional settings. Currently he is an assistant professor of psychology at Texas A&M International University. His research interests include violent criminal behavior, positive and negative influences of video games and other violent media and refinements in meta-analytic techniques."

http://www.sagepub.com/authorDetails.nav?contribId=628346

The author of the submitted article doesn't even have high-quality training or high-quality publications on the issue he is writing about in the submitted article. The submitted article consists mostly of name-calling, rather than any reference to newly discovered data or fresh analysis of familiar data. I'd usually expect better of an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Couldn't help but point out that on a 3gs iPhone running 3.0 OS almost everything in that article is refuted. (It's still hilarious, though.)
This goes to show that copyfight is going to win and we will be paying for their content and or consume it legally. We were doing so before p2p came along and we'll do so again.

An unpopular opinion in these parts, but just look at the last ten years of tech and copyright. Copyright has always won in the end. This industry (tech) though has thankfully forced their hand and copyright is now offering good alternatives to piracy that are legal (hulu, youtube music vids, etc).
It may be - but for government work, that's the way it is.

It should be simpler, but there's a whole lot of vested interest in making these things difficult and obscure to get into, which is something the Sunlight guys ran head-first into. So they tried, learned some, and maybe will be more prepared next time comes around.

You won't change how the government runs contracts by posting on a blog. You probably won't do it either by submitting an inexperienced RFP. But of the two, repeated attempts at the latter probably have a better chance.
"As I said before, this RFP was written in a different language. That language isn't something we spoke fluently. We just took our first 101 class and have begun to learn the language and the nuance involved and we can start sharing it with you as we learn more."

This alone will change the world.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/dec/10/usa.terrorism1
How long until I can get that enzyme as a topping on a double-fudge sundae?
Having done the polyphasic experience some years back, and having a long-term girlfriend, I can confirm that it does not negatively impact the important things in life.

In fact, because you have so many extra hours at your disposal, you can seem almost magical. You can work 12 hours a day and spend another 9-10 hours doing engaging things with other people in your life.
Investment Funds Tougher To Obtain
How so? I didn't find anything referring to that on their site.
The previous post on the topic (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=657859) has a link to the actual paper.