skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Carbon emissions from the Engine Yard contest?
Way back in the day, I overclocked my desktop computer so I could run SETI@home faster. I've always wondered how much electricity I wasted by running SETI instead of shutting it down when I wasn't using it.

Anyone care to guess how much electricity (and resulting CO2) has been used for the Engine Yard contest? I'm not saying the contest was some sort of ecological disaster, but I would suggest that perhaps EY should put up a little money toward offsetting the carbon footprint generated. Plant some trees or something.
Keep warm during winters
Nowadays, most countries in the world are suffering from very harsh climates resulting in many people opting for much warmer clothes.
Sounds like good idea.

If you have to go with software only for some reason, Squeak should be nice. Also VPython (http://vpython.org/) allows one to animate 3D-scenes easily. PyGame (http://www.pygame.org/news.html) might also be worth a look, however it is slightly more difficult to get started (the level of abstraction seems to be a bit lower, as you handle sprites yourself).
"I'd disagree that the meaning of life is to have kids."

It might very well be "to get high" ;)

A value in re-asserting a broad, cross-cultural interest in getting high is that it helps demystify it, helps people realize that the drive to get high it is not because of week will or moral turpitude or twisted genes.

It, like the desire to have kids, is simple a common, basic, human desire.
His clients cutting back on their marketing budget? (or perhaps slashing the funds for the annual corporate party and doing without the motivational speaker; Tears for Fears were cheaper, plus their songs are catchy.)
Not only expert in Cryptography but also math progidy, Bo-Yin Yang was a mathematics prodigy in Taiwan. The competition is just best for people who already good at problem solving in the domain.
Ning could be huge. They've got the potential to own the majority of niches online.

Remember that the size of the niche is irrelevant - if you own 100% of the 100 Trek cyclists in the world, thats really valuable.
I am not sure how mint does it, but several ways to store highly secure data is since you asked for it

* Boxes have no direct internet connection
* Spread the Ciphertext, Decryption Keys, and Algorithm
across multiple yet different machines (each with unique
distributions/operation systems and data storage
solution).
* Instead of a global salt, use a separate salt per each
user (login name / account creation time)
* Generate the encryption/decryption keys for storing the
credentials using a newhash(login+password) and use it
only when the user logs in (this hash is never stored,
it's hashed, generate the encryption/decryption keys,
decrypt the data, use the data, and destroyed). So this
key only awailable for a short period of time when the
user logs in.
* Use something strong to encrypt like PGP as the base
and roll-your-own obscure one on top of it (which is a
non-standard algorithm)

There will always be holes and weaknesses, it's just making it really really hard, never impossible.
but who will administer the cloud ?
Because becoming an architect takes years of education and training. You have to fight and juggle the demands of clients, planners, neighbours and the occupants. It's expensive. It's slow. Most architects don't get to build anything significant until their late 40s or 50s. You're very likely to lose your job every time there's a recession.

With software you can make whatever you want, right now.
To be fair, many other "elite" (translation: you pay a ridiculous amount of money to attend) do receive these benefits. I believe our breakfasts are part of our meal plan at Northwestern, but I would assume that Harvard has some kind of similar student meal plan.
I agree, and while the project we were on didn't have strong typing of money, what I described was the database storage of the numbers. We did very few calculations, and the system was explicitly USD, so going deep into "proper" handling of money was just unnecessary.

I really do like using the type system to keep track of units (type system either in the object oriented sense, or the haskell type system). This is similar to Joel's old article about using a naming scheme for dirty vs. sanitized strings for the web. It's all a type system, just his was in a language that didn't support language-level types.
My Quick Picks for roles in this movie.

Verne Troyer as a gnome rogue.

Angelina Jolie as some kind of Night Elf Priestess (so geeks around the world can continue their masturbatory fantasies)

Bruce Campbell as the Human Mage (for sheer badassedness)

John Rhys-Davies as a Dwarf Warrior (cmon, he had Gimli nailed)
If I was paying the cost of Harvard tuition, I would demand a free, hot breakfast. Borne aloft on a bed of feathers and myrrh by six naked, greased eunuchs.
CoPP? What is that?
This would be difficult to calculate, because many of the resources dedicated to EY would still be running without the contest - they just would be doing something else.

Figuring out how much extra power is used solely for EY, that would otherwise be turned off?

You'd need to poll all participants and find out what hardware they are throwing at it vs. their normal operating state. I think it would be a worthwhile effort, but might be fairly tedious.
Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Most enterprises already run binary blobs from Microsoft, as MS distributes nearly all of its software that way.
Indeed - God, do I wish I had had Squeak to play with when I was 4 years old. I wish that more kids were exposed to such tools at an early age.
Are you saying you still have a tail? ;-)
"However, does the intelligence of Picasso, Dali or even Warhol play a significant part in their creativity?"

I think for these artists (and most modern artists) a good deal of the value of their work comes from having been particularly clever about what makes something art, and what people have already experienced and now expect. Van Gogh, on the other hand, probably did much less intellectualizing about his work.

But I'm still skeptical that you can have a keen eye for color and composition, and the selection of subject matter, and be dopey. Most so-called "naive" art, or "outsider art", tends to look cluttered and ill-planned. Often that effect is the appeal, but it stands in contrast to the spatial organization of work done by more culturally established artists.
http://artequalswork.com/2008/11/a-case-for-logic/
Yet another freedom-suppression technology.
"Who has heard of an organism adapting to change by cutting their limbs off?"

Like this?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090325170604.ht...
The Incredible Bread Machine - Hacked
I don’t see why you can’t have "one size fits all" recognition. It just requires more advanced profiling. The computer has to be smart enough to use all the words leading up to that one hard to recognize word. Not to mention other cues like grammar check (which would have revealed a lot of what went wrong in the example the author uses)

I’m not saying it’s easy. In fact, I’d be willing to bet money that I personally don’t have the programming chops to do it effectively. But I know enough to know it can be done.
Entrepreneur Fundraising Pitches:  Substance Trumps Form, But Form Does Matter
There are two false assumptions in his analogies:

1) That corporations don't already know this: I think most do, and cut their costs on infrastructure, overhead, and process, not on areas that impact quality and customers.
2) That the recession is permanent: Accepting a slow downward spiral temporarily while waiting for a recovery probably could make sense to the risk analysts in some corporations. The trick comes in predicting what the company's losses will be vs. recovery time for the economy, and then the company.

In short, smart companies look at all options. Their long-term cost to keep quality up and maintain customers might actually be more than shrinking for a year or two, then recovering.

Professing that one approach is always the right one is incorrect. It depends on too many factors to generalize.
Wouldn't the last pick be a form of type-casting? ;-)
Should I give 2 weeks notice before I quit?
Network-Centric Mass ENS for Higher Education
UCLA protects students and staff in an emergency with AtHoc emergency alerting system
The issue I was experiencing was that the back button would remain grayed out regardless of where I went... on Youtube. And only on Youtube.

Seeing how navigating a site with no back button is pretty much impossible (or at least very convoluted), I think it's safe to assume that it's more likely that this is a bug than some sort of grand conspiracy.

Let's put it in perspective: Google knows they're an underdog when it comes browsers and that surfers that use Chrome typically know how they can switch to other browsers if Chrome isn't working for them.
I think there are a few competent programmers who wouldn't mind working on some Drupal-powered sites like Ubuntu, Nasa, Warner Brothers, the Onion, Playboy Germany, Fast Company, Grateful Dead, Harvard's Science and Engineering Dept, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Amnesty International, Popular Science, Universal Music etc etc http://socialcmsbuzz.com/45-drupal-sites-which-you-may-not-h...
Given it's basically one paragraph of advice stretched over 5 I'd guess it had something to do with the need to write something every day.

When you create artificial deadlines like that for yourself (as he does) I'd imagine most of your writing is done more out of obligation than inspiration.
One thing to consider as well is most Drupal/Wordpress/Joomla installs don't actually require "coding", but rather downloading the correct modules and setting up permissions / htaccess correctly. Not really challenging enough to keep many compsci students engaged...
Notable that the GPU seemed to run far faster than the CPU for these calculation instances. I think many of the low Hamming achievers used Nvidia GPUs using CUDA which ran up to 700 million hashes per second (seeing the tesla machine in the article).

So you probably want to go for GPU than CPU. There's a service called Hoopoe that does GPU cloud computing that uses CUDA: http://www.gass-ltd.co.il/hoopoe/
Dark Omens in the Sky: Do Superstitious Beliefs Affect Investment Decisions?
Personally I find the GPL distasteful; because it locks you in. Frustrating (and I cant help feeling causes substantial code duplication for some projects that dont want to use GPL code)

That's probably true of any license based on philosophy. People who don't agree may be inclined to reinvent the wheel just to put it under a license they do believe in.
I wonder what perceptual damage this will do to the Harvard brand?

Being one of the world's leading business school and being in financial trouble just doesn't look good.
Social Bookmarking Sharing Buttons For Your Site
Isn't that true of most competitions?
Yeah, with my SETI example, I overclocked my computer mainly for the purpose of running the SETI client faster. I assume that an overclocked machine uses more power, and that an overclocked machine at 100% CPU utilization uses significantly more.

I'd be interested mainly in a ballpark/analogy figure. Are we talking "I forgot to turn off the night-light" or "Could power 5 homes for a year"?
To play devil's advocate. . .

It's not that the 'fat cats' have power to fight back. It's that they're less easily replaced. If you get rid of a janitor and need to replace them in a couple months because you really needed them, it's an easy HR process. If you get rid of a 'fat cat', there will be months of interviews to replace them, you might not get someone as good, etc. It's not that you have power in the institution, it's that you have other options and are of higher value to the institution.

I mean, I'm a lowly computer programmer a couple years out of college. But if they wanted to replace me, there'd be a long interview process and then a huge learning curve as they brought the new person up to speed on the byzantine systems we have. So, they can't let me go as a test of whether they could get by without me because the cost if they're wrong is high.

That doesn't make it righteous, it just means that it isn't simply having power in the institution so much as being of less easily replaced value to the institution.
For me the axioms of creativity are:

1. Change the axioms

2. Go meta on the axioms

So, if you change these axioms you're going to be creatively
creative. How meta.

In conclusion, this comment is very creative.
Greased? I'm afraid to ask how that adds to the experience.
It seems like Drupal always gets dumped on for having a crappy codebase (see xinsight's comments as an example). Admittedly, I've not spent a lot of time in the Drupal codebase, but I've used Drupal extensively on a number of projects. I've looked at a lot of other CMS's (e.g. Joomla, Plone, IBM's WCM). Drupal kicks the crap out of the other alternatives. Plone is so strange, it doesn't even seem like Python.

The point that I think a lot of folks miss about Drupal (and CMS's in general) is that they are REALLY hard to write. If you're a RoR or Django developer, sit down some weekend and try to reproduce the Drupal core functionality. Get back to me in 6 months when you're ready to test.

I'm a Django developer by trade, but when I come across a client that needs a CMS, I'm not going to reinvent the wheel. Drupal is fantastic and very sophisticated. You can do amazing things with CCK and views.
' ... instead of being an "individual," each of them is a "multitude.'

Dana: I want you inside me.

Venkman: Go ahead! No, I can’t, sounds like you’ve
already got at least two people in there already.
Might be a little crowded.
Sorry, I should've been clearer: I wasn't complaining about the pagination, I was complaining about the lack of anything resembling editing. You don't need six long pages to explain the presence of financial mismanagement at a large institution. It would be nice if I had the personal bandwidth to read that much text to get a simple summary of the issues, but I don't.

I found it interesting that my comment was modded down lower than another that questions the whole point behind Harvard's existence.
It seems that on a lot of these points they fail to realize that they're exactly the reason Ubuntu outperforms Windows in some of these areas. In regard to backup software, they say, "Yes it's available, but why isn't it there by default?" Perhaps it's because Canonical's stated goal is to fit an entire operating system on a single CD. If they crammed in everyone's favorite feature to the base distribution, that wouldn't happen. People are more concerned with getting up and running with OpenOffice, email, etc... immediately. If I want to backup my data, I'll worry about that once I'm back to being productive. I'm happy to just grab it from the repository.

Also, I outright disagree with some of their observations about ease of use. They say that Windows is actually pretty good at hand-holding when you "troubleshoot" something. Me? I've never once had any success using the "troubleshoot" tools to fix something. I've never once had a problem I couldn't solve by a quick search of Ubuntu's forums/documentation and editing the config files myself.

And I almost laughed when they said Ubuntu should use ideas from Windows UAC... All in all, I really think this article fails to realize the difference between Ubuntu and Windows. I don't think Ubuntu is trying to BE Windows. If anything, they're trying to reaplce it (and I don't even think that's their goal). There's no point in competing with Microsoft if you have the same vision as them. Ubuntu has it's own goal, so does Mac.
They are included in our meal plan, but we admittedly pay a ridiculous amount of money for food that's really not that great.

Just registered to do a Northwestern High-Five!
What do they think we should do, close our eyes and wish the deficit away?

No, they think we should raise taxes on people richer than they are. Your political opponents are not crazy, they just have different goals.
A lot of times when I read these things, the sort of pro-Linux with pro-Microsoft points articles, I can't help but feel it is paid for by Microsoft. It certainly seems like I have been seeing more and more of these kinds of things over the last few months.
I was more surprised by "eunuchs".
i don't think that full-time jobs are going to be about installing drupal, but developing modules.
Dont worry, I'm not.
My god. Thanks so much for taking the time to write all of that. I'm going to do most of these whether or not I blog it. Just some brilliant ideas.

Having said that, I really wish that since you took the time to write all of that down that you would have taken the time to register to comment.

A lot of people would see that and it would help a lot of people like us out.

Anyway, thanks soo much again. Hearing your ideas and your story is going to be one of the experiences I take away from this experiment.
Review of 'The Accidental Billionaires,' the (embellished) story of FB
Yeah write a crossplatform alarm that annoys users so much that 10% of its users end up throwing off their laptops and PCs at one moment!
The whole premise of this editorial seems to be that electronics are cheaper today than they were twenty or thirty years ago because workers are now being terribly exploited and abused. And we should feel guilty about that. There are several obvious flaws in this argument. The first is that electronics prices have come down for a whole raft of reasons ranging from currency exchange rates, to miniaturization, to automation. Labour is only one small part of the equation. The second is that crappy working conditions are not unique to electronics factories in China. Those pyjamas you wore last night, the one's where the crotch split the second time you put them on, were also made in a sweatshop somewhere. Years ago it might have been a sweatshop in New York City. Today it's a sweatshop in Nicarauga or Malaysia. I'm very keen on seeing working conditions improve for everyone, I just don't think that price is a meaningful metric for trying to gauge whether the factory worker is getting a fair shake.
I thought that Alan Dershowitz' comment was particularly interesting:

Apparently nobody in our financial office has read the story in Genesis about Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dream—you know, during the seven good years you save for the seven lean years. And now they’re coming hat in hand, pleading to the faculty and students to bear the burden of cutbacks. It’s a scandal! It’s an absolute scandal, the way Harvard has handled this financial crisis.

The issue that a lot of organizations and businesses seem to be facing now is that they're doing like he says and spending in the fat years what they have which makes the lean years painful. However, this also applies to spending on salaries. As the article notes, Harvard spends a lot more on professor salaries than other Universities because, during the fat years, they spent what they had giving it to professors. And now Professor Dershowitz complains that he has to share in the lean years just as he shared in the fat years.

There are only two plausible ways to do it. Either salaries stay at a pretty steady rate and don't rise in the fat years and hurt in the lean years because the rises are smaller -or- salaries run in tandem with the fat and lean years. You can't get huge raises in the fat years and expect it through the lean years as well.

Now, clearly Harvard's building spree is the cause of some of the hurt, but it isn't like the faculty and students haven't taken their cut of the fat years with the highest professor salaries around and students who pay next to nothing in tuition. If you want in on the fat years, you get in on the lean years.
Unlike Switzerland, the US is actually worth attacking. Not that Switzerland isn't, but it's in an easily defensible position. It's easy to make attacking Switzerland a bad cost-benefit. Not so much the US.

Plus we have obligations to protect foreign allies.
It all depends on the job type naturally - assuming you're working for a web-dev shop, most work will likely be new site launches v.s. new feature development. If you're working client side, then correct its likely module enhancement.
Drupal is a great concept, but the actual implementation leaves a lot to be desired.

A few things stand out in my opinion:

- no good upgrade path across major versions (automated!)

- modules tend to disappear between versions, stop being maintained or get redone without any regard for backwards compatibility.

(this thread http://drupal.org/node/327225 was quite an eye opener for me)

- the database model - I don't know of a better way to say this - sucks. Using 5.x it makes a table per cck field, which makes drupal sites much heavier on the machine than they should be.

If they fix those three issues it will be a world of a difference.

We host about 3,000 drupal sites, and the potential to increase that 100 fold is there but the above issues are holding that back.
Fault Tolerance - comic strip - "It's not a database"
Are there any similar time-blocking options for the Mac? Sounds like a great way to force somebody off the computer.
A Conversation with OpenDNS
Infrastructure and overhead DO impact customers, just not immediately. Overhead actually impacts more customers than any other single item or department, since it is the total of support costs for all departments.
> He died to keep the next generation of that phone from your prying eyes. This is a reason so mundane and trivial that the mind reels.

Wouldn't it be beautiful if we (as a society) could satisfy all our needs and our desires without feeling guilty?

Every time I try to discuss this with people (especially with friends and relatives) I am vehemently reminded that this is a taboo topic.
Good arguments. Upvoted even though I disagree with many of them.

I've never once had a problem I couldn't solve by a quick search of Ubuntu's forums/documentation and editing the config files myself.

That's a lot harder than what the average computer user wants. When I used Ubuntu, I was terrified of the config files, and I hated forum searching to solve problems. It seemed like such an inelegant solution.
too slow google - dropbox is everything I wanted from GDrive, and more.
To the Moon - with extreme engineering
Coming home from college this summer I've realized how many of my friends sell drugs as their summer occupation. Just selling weed earns you twice what you'd make doing long hours for minimum wage, it seems.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted to get in on the business. Seems like a high-risk high-reward situation.
Let me try to sketch how bad it can get:

In the mid 80's I worked for a game company for about a year (Aackosoft, flightdeck, indy 500 on the Atari) and I inherited a project from another programmer. After reading the code for a couple of days I realized that he'd been planning his 'exit' for a considerable time. The could would assemble (the 68k part) and compile (the C part) but other than that you couldn't make heads or tails of it.

Every variable was named after a vegetable, a fruit or a plant and every subroutine after a famous person.

It took quite a while just to get things back to self documenting names, after that another month or so to restructure it to the point where it started to do what it was intended to do.

There would indeed have been much joy in writing it again, but there was just as much joy in figuring it out and getting it to work.
So what he's saying here is, "surround yourself with people smarter than you."

That's why I spend time on HN. Lots of people here know a lot more than I do about a lot of different subjects.