skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As I understand "fair use", you have to admit to copyright violation(s) first. Fair use in the USA is a small carve-out of the exclusivity rights, for things like review, commentary, education, etc. The Wikipedia page on "fair use" says it's an affirmative defense (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_defense).

I also think you're confused about the moral basis for exclusive copyrights. The possible "benefits" for society are legally the only motivation for granting limited exclusive rights. Economically, monopolies (exclusive rights) are pretty bad all around, and politically, copyright is easily abused to stifle or chill free speech. We, as a society, put up with some odious side effects of copyright, in order to get people to produce more stuff now for general use later.

So, tell me why the Author's Guild don't get penalized for bringing a frivolous suit against Google - what google did is obviously for the best of society in general, and probably will be good for the authors in particular.
Does anyone know if it's pure community PostgreSQL or if there are modifications? If there are modifications, is it 100% compatible?
> The universe probably is not deterministic (at least in the sense we think about determinism). That's a hard pill to swallow, and it goes against all human intuition.

It really doesn't contradict "all human intuition". Strong determinism has always been a controversial position, though its popular with the people that view science as a new complete-and-all-encompassing religion rather than a utilitarian tool.
What would be really nice is a world where you buy the paper book, and get the e-book with it. I like my oversized book shelf at home, but taking books with you is also convenient.
Creating a branch is instant (well < 5 seconds).

Switching branches depends on how much change there is between the previous branch and the one you are switching to. It basically sends all the files that have changed. On our solution which is about 120,000 files, it takes about 10-25 seconds on HTTPS/WebDAV protocol.

It's fast enough. I switch probably 2-3 times a day.

You can check each branch out separately if you want but this isn't necessary and probably is the cause of the pain you had.
ha, i've been giving talks on this very subject ;)
http://vimeo.com/73178238

btw i'm a big fan of jeff's approach and hope it works out well.
This is HUGE!

I'm using the AWS stack for http://www.soundslice.com/ and I've been using MySQL instead of Postgres, purely because my hatred for MySQL is less than my hatred for being a sysadmin. It was a tradeoff, and I miss Postgres dearly every time I use MySQL.

This new Amazon offering solves that.

I wrote a little more about my AWS setup here: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/aws-notes/
I'm not sure as to what defines a field as "science" nor do I found it a very interesting question. What I do find interesting is the desire to apply the scientific method in economics.

The issue comes with the "testing" portion of the method. One is unable to setup economic experiments to perform these tests. Economists can make claims about historical events but they must a priori decide which data to ignore and which to include in their analysis. Things like this lead to two seemingly cogent, logical analysis of the great depression with one concluding that the Fed was the cause of the depression and another claiming it to be the savior. They both may have sound logic but their a priori assumptions were different.

In physics, you rarely have this scenario as experimentalists can setup artificial testing situation where they have control over how variables change. They can systematically change variables and observe the effects. A great deal of the work in physics goes into the explanation of the magnitude of effect variables have on results, largely to justify why certain effects can be ignored.

Ludwig von Mises wrote extensively about the problem attempting to apply the scientific method economics. He felt economics was fundamentally different from a field of study such as physics. I tend to agree with this. Side note, I have a Ph.D. in physics and am just an amateur economist. :)
If you were to claim economics is not science because it rarely involves repeatable experiments, you would have to throw out a large chunk of what we commonly think of as science. Did we discover that the moon orbits the earth with repeatable experiments? Did we discover black holes, the existence of dinosaurs, the big bang, the causes of earthquakes, the causes of volcanoes, the cause of hurricanes, etc. with repeatable experiments? Do you want to throw all that out as nonscientific nonsense?

It took us a long time to discover such basic things as the fact that the Earth goes around the sun despite the fact that people had been trying to figure it out for millenia. For much of that time, research was hampered by politics and the unwillingness of people to accept the consequences of possibilities beyond what was widely held as true, some of the same problems pinned by many on economics today.

Economics is a discipline that is really in its infancy. Like astronomy, it is going to rely on observation much more than experimentation. Like astronomy, it is still a science, and like astronomy, it always has been and always will be, even if we draw inconclusive, politically tainted, or wrong conclusions today.
'I don't know' is never a good answer. If someone asks you about some specific javascript testing framework, for example, and your answer is simply 'I don't know', that implies that you know nothing about javascript testing. Replying 'I don't know about X, but I've worked with Y in the past, and heard about Z' is an answer that shows that you are familiar with the problem space, which is vastly more important than knowing some random piece of tech.
The conventional wisdom is that rc quads are _more_ susceptible to winds than rc acrobatic helicopters (and have lower max speeds) largely because they usually have a "cupped" shape to their props (to maximize efficient static thrust) which can catch catch a cross wind. In contrast an acrobatic rc heli has perfectly straight/flat blades that change pitch to create lift and are quite "invisible" from the side.

That said, in this design, having two different types of rotors mounted non-symmetrically seems bound to induce some yaw from winds.
Thank you so much for posting this. I developed a bad habit of avoiding admissions of ignorance at the very start of my career because I felt shunned or slighted when I was honest about my lack of knowledge. It was terrible. For a long time I felt trapped, I felt like I had to lie or mislead to be taken seriously and that very lying hurt my ability to learn more.

If someone at the start of their career asked me about having this problem now I'd instinctively tell her or him that it's not worth working with the people you find yourself being dishonest around. But how do you find the good people? It's hard, and it's when you are least experienced that you will have the most trouble differentiating between the knowledgeable and the hangers on.

This is a huge huge problem in our industry. And I think a lot of it stems from the fact that 3 years ago when I knew nothing but the HTML & CSS I picked up on hobby projects and a couple college CS classes, what was I? I was a web developer. What am I now after 3 years of real projects, working with devs that know far more than I do, reading a ton, going to talks, and taking on increasingly more responsibility on projects? I'm still a web developer. In that context it's very challenging to be the person who is new to the field because everyone wants you to be the expert, and can be mean when you're not.
What I assume is the "impersonated" identity also appears to be in roughly the same business as this "David Bushell".

https://plus.google.com/117339560374768937720/posts
When they say 'wind' do they mean all the hot air produced by all the people using it?
As someone who's never used RDS - does this let you adjust the postgresql.conf settings? Specifically interested in turning off synchronous commit or adjusting shared_buffers. If that is possible this would be a godsend.
+1000, and latching on to this top comment for more visibility ...

also check out jeff's related post on bringing startup culture to academic research!
http://jeffhuang.com/adopting_the_startup_culture_for_resear...
Show HN: The best way to run PHP apps
You have to understand that after the 1950s in the United States, everyone thought cars were awesome. They allowed you to go farther than anywhere else before and they allowed a greater mobility in general than ever before. Combined with the dream of having a house and a yard, this allowed for sprawl.

So cities were planned around this. San Francisco itself even had a boom where it tried to utilize cars as much as possible. There were either freeways or plan to build more freeways cutting through the city to get to places. There was going to be a 2nd Bay Bridge to San Leandro, why? Because they wanted more traffic to get into the city and they didn't trust his new fangled thing called BART (the train system for those of you who don't know it).

I don't know what the situation was in England or other European countries when cars started taking off but I imagine there had to be something similar, maybe just not with the same momentum as the United States.
A lot of it has to do with the culture of shame that causes us to posture in the first place. We bullshit because we're afraid of what the other person's reaction will be like.

I feel fortunate to work for a company that has a zero-tolerance policy for shaming others and their code knowledge. In fact, it's much more common to hear something like "I'm not familiar with that - could you teach me?" instead. Weekly, we show off new tools or techniques we've discovered so the chances of being left in the dark are slimmer. It leads to a lot more open discussions and a better overall base of knowledge across the entire company.
it does that already... algorithm gets smarted over time... initially its mostly wisdom of crowd and could be a lot hit and miss....
of course i disagree. There are plenty of things that would benefit the public but are illegal. Maybe an infinite number of things.
It isn't going to take "someone" – it is going to take a large cultural shift.

Out of the top 10 largest cities in the US only three of them are livable without a car - NY, Philadelphia and Chicago. (San Francisco is not in the top 10 for size)

Real estate developers like to build cheap and fast. Urban planners do what the book tells them. Public transportation is politically unpopular. And American's love, just love, their cars – don't do anything to get in the way (bike lanes, dedicated bus lanes, congestion pricing).

I do think that younger American's are more urban and are looking for a change. So we shall see what the future offers.
As much as I desperately want out-of-print books to be available, I really didn't like that court case. The idea of a small group of authors being allowed to negotiate away the rights of authors everywhere to one party only (Google) is absurd.

This is something that really needs legislative action.
Crazy fast? The first request of Postgres on RDS was made over 4 years ago. https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=37834&sta...
How We Failed Our Way to a Day on the Front Page of Hacker News
F-Secure's new VPN could erase regional copyright borders
One thing I've believed for a very long time (based on some first hand observations) and that this article backs up:

Super-rich people who got that way by doing productive things or entrepreneurial things -- people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, etc. -- are statistically rare. They are simply the most visible members of the superclass. The majority of people with net worth in the top of the 1% are financial or governmental profiteers who have obtained that wealth by playing financial games or profiting off the public.

In other words: the majority, but not all, of the mega-rich are parasites.

This I think has important political consequences. It's one of the reasons I am skeptical of populist "tax the rich!" schemes.

My strong speculation would be that the productivity of the mega-rich is inversely proportional to their political pull. I base that on the fact that this rule of thumb holds lower in the hierarchy-- those who are of the highest merit are rarely those with the most political skill and influence since few people have time to invest in both. People tend to be good politicians or good producers but not both.

As a result, soak-the-rich schemes are likely to thin the ranks of the productive elite and the recent entrants to the elite ("neuvo riche") while leaving the true oligarchy largely untouched. In fact, the true oligarchy would likely find ways to profit from it. In the long run it would impose a stronger glass ceiling between the superclass and the rest, making them even more like a true feudal nobility. It would make the situation worse.

I am not sure what, if anything, can change this situation in the short term.

I do have one weird suggestion: make it easier to become super-rich. Create some mechanism, possibly in tax law, that vaults people up through the last two or three glass ceilings... maybe something like a mildly progressive tax with sharp dips or fluctuations at major milestone points in the wealth distribution curve. So once you hit a point where there would otherwise be a glass ceiling, your tax rate drops precipitously for a while. It would be of paramount importance that this mechanism be impartial -- that it exclude political gamesmanship as a factor.

This is both counter-intuitive and unfair, so why would it be a good idea? Because it would bum-rush the country club with neuvo riche folks with new ideas. Some of these new ideas might change the system in ways that would benefit the rest of us. Even if there was no direct benefit to the lower 99.5%, it would prevent the ultimate nightmare scenario: the calcification of this elite into a true closed feudal nobility presiding over some kind of new dark age.

Edit:

I realized that while I've never read the idea above anywhere before, I have heard a similar idea in the realm of representative democracy... namely to vastly increase the number of representatives. The idea is to have a Congress made up of 30,000 delegates and a Senate made of up 5000 or something similar. It's basically the same concept... make the system more democratic by making the pyramid fatter at the top.
Is this a joke?

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1752366
Folks, why are you upvoting this?

It only talks about CPU usage, Node not being Unixy enough, and Javascript being terrible.

A better critique would have included talks about callback hell, or the general philosophical issues of non-block/evented work versus synchronous programming: see the classic http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzkRVzciAZg .

This isn't even that great a rant.

(I appreciate my fellow Rails devs probably upvoting it out of spite, but c'mon...)
TL;DR OP knows very little about cancer...
Been waiting for this for a long time, can finally nudge our clients that want to use RDS (for various reasons) to use a sane DB. Thanks Amazon!
The PC BIOS is Insecure As Hell. WHY?
I feel terrible because while I can relate perfectly to the author's fears, I'm finding I envy her ability to write so well.
Here's the announcement on the AWS blog - http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/11/amazon-rds-for-postgresql...
I disagree.

's' has no meaning by itself, which means that you have to read all of the context surrounding 's' into your short term memory just to gain any understanding of the single line you may be interested in. That's slow and more work than necessary most of the time.

Also, naming things is a habit and a style. Short variable naming leaks out of 4 line methods into any 40 and 400 line methods you may eventually write, and it leaks into the ABIs/APIs of your application. I've rarely seen any code that would use 's' appropriately in a 4 line method that wouldn't hesitate to use it everywhere else inappropriately.
i don't think it benefits authors. I think searching for a book and reading a few pages and being done with it. That isn't ideal for authors at all. Some people just need to read a few things in the book.
I've heard about PostgreSQL and know that HN community raves about it, but am currently using RDS with MySQL.

Does it make sense to migrate to PostgreSQL, I don't have a lot of data as I'm in the early stage?
What are the primary advantages that PostgreSQL provides over MySQL?
Any advise/pointers is appreciated.
Aren't there already plenty of courses and books out there about algorithms, data structures, RDBMS, etc?

I have a pretty good background in a lot of that (can always learn more of course), but I don't know anything about Hadoop and MapReduce (which is conveniently not mentioned in your critique, probably because it does fall under your list of acceptable topics), so I find this course interesting. I find the claim of "if you know the fundamentals, you don't need a course in that" to be dubious. Essentially you are saying that any learning material specifically targeting Hadoop is unnecessary?

Don't worry though, I'm not looking for some quick fix to my business needs, I'm not going to go out and spin up a Hadoop cluster on my 500GB of production data, I just want to learn. You're arguing more against your perceived motivations of the course-takers than the validity of the course itself.
Both are actually using the old Google REST API that didn't have a such restricted free quota as the current custom search API. But the REST API has been marked as deprecated for three years now and might be subject to the next spring cleaning. (According to Google terms, it even might be shut down this month without further notice.)
Skymall is fucked.
Well, if they're going to move in a bigger way into SF, Mission Bay makes sense. It's basically a big ghost town. Lots of UCSF-owned medical facilities and lifeless condos. But plenty of space. And it's relatively close to the transit hubs in South Beach.

As a nearby resident and worker, though, I'm not looking forward to the traffic or the added residential real estate crunch. We've got the Giants, soon we'll have the Warriors, we'll have a few huge high rises going up, a huge Salesforce campus in the works, and maybe we'll have a Google office. Oy vey.
This will make the ease of Elastic Beanstalk much more appealing.
Agree 100%. I see us getting closer to this with Amazon's Matchbook program.
Opinion: nobody should be shipping any JS to oldIE, period.

Their JS engines are woeful. Even if you can get something app-like (the kind of thing you would use dart for) to work, your app won't scale w.r.t. perf so you're painting yourself into a corner.
Why is PostgreSQL more expensive than MySQL?
Cool. That Google build cgroups makes even more sense now.
It's not a "bad" place to live, it's simply suburban, thus younger people tend to prefer SF.

How would you "change" it? It's just not dense enough to support enough grocery stores/restaurants that everyone could walk everywhere. There are small downtown areas of each city where that may be possible but those areas are going to be expensive.
Yeah, and that came out in 2007.. 6 years or so after .Net and Mono were started...
1. It would be trivial to implement feature in bitcoin clients to automatically bounce transactions from blacklisted addresses.

2. The situation is the same as if someone irl where to accidentally purchase stolen goods. Or as if you where accidentally spamlisted because you forgot to secure your smtp server. Your options would be:

a) Return the bitcoins and clear your status.
b) Argue your case with the operators of blacklist B.
c) Ignore your blacklisting and just don't do business with those who follow blacklist B. If they blacklist addresses for frivolous reasons, more people will ignore their list and it won't matter if you are on it or not.

A decent client could automatically keep the blacklists updated so it would hardly be any burden for normal users.
Huh? It is copyright infringement. That is the whole basis of a "fair use" defense: you have to admit its copyright infringement first.

For everything else, you should probably read the actual decision..
So climate change is not a science, huh? Theory of evolution isn't either?
This looks interesting. Is it brand new? I've seen parsers with similar names, but, of course, almost all short letter combinations containing xml have been used, so that's expected.

It doesn't allocate or buffer, so when it says that it verifies proper nesting, I assume that doesn't mean verifying that start tags and end tags have matching names. I think that would be impossible.

I've been looking for a decent C parser similar to this to try some experiments with. Dealing with XML can be dreary, but I like to try to think of how you might make an API that doesn't make your code suck. It would be at a higher level, so I might be able to use this.

It looks like you pass the parse function a character at a time. To be fast, you'd want to somehow encourage that to get inlined. I'm not sure how easy or possible it is when you put the function in a separate .c file. There would probably be ways to stuff everything into the header.

I'm interested particularly in parsers that don't buffer. It seems like a fundamentally more flexible and potentially better way to parse XML is by memory mapping and letting the VM do what it does best.
MySQL (free) and Oracle BYOL (no additional license cost) are the same cost at RDS. Since PG is free, I'd guess the cost will be the same as MySQL.
I wonder if this approach will eventually be useful in eliminating Chronic Lyme Disease.
(I'm Jim Fowler.) Thank you---I certainly appreciate it.

The Calculus One videos are available at http://youtube.com/kisonecat and the new Calculus Two: Sequences and Series videos will be posted soon.
So your videos are going to be available as torrents from your own site? Good luck growing your audience.

EDIT: turns out that she was considering hosting commentary on her own site, but has no plans to take her videos off YouTube, and criticized BB for a misleading headline: https://twitter.com/vihartvihart/status/401035312819736576

I don't care for the integration of G+ in YouTube either, but a) there was no shortage of hateful BS in YouTube comments prior to this (as well as some outstanding humor) and b) you can disable comments and even ratings for any video that you upload and/or make them private (eg for fans or even paying subscribers).
Gmail iOS app refined for iOS 7
So, you posted this (at least, at time of me writing this) twice in this thread. I disagree and would like to provide a counter argument below at least one of your submissions.

1. You mix pseudonym and anonymous (your other post says "They do officially support anonymity").

2. The Real Name™ BS is still binding for the main G+ account. I have to tell Google my name, then they are kind enough to allow me to enrich their knowledge about me with all the online handles I use...

That _might_ be enough for the use case the GP described, it very much isn't 'anonymous', not 'pseudonymous' if you tell name and handle to the biggest ad company on this planet and still a real name policy that is utterly broken and stupid.

(Minor G+ rant follows)

People like me are seeing the technical proficiency of the G+ system every day. If my GMail tab (for whatever reasons) logs me out I can log in again - just to be sent to my 'suspended profile'. Note that I was looking at GMail moments ago and certainly would like to see Gmail again.

Instead of G+ I get this:

Your profile is currently suspended
Until your profile is unsuspended, you will be unable to use this feature.
Visit your profile to learn more.

where 'profile' links to https://profiles.google.com/me?hl=en - which goes in a loop (url again plus.google.com/something/foo, same text, no way out).
You can use the Amazon RDS Parameter Groups to exercise control over dozens of PostgreSQL settings.