skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You seem to be taking the article's statements as facts and treating the story as a representative subsample. I don't think either is the case.

Most high-frequency trading provides liquidity to a market, not takes it, especially in US stocks. That way, you not only possibly get some edge from the bid/ask spread, you also may collect "liquidity rebates" (see http://www.batstrading.com/FeeSchedule for one fee schedule for an exchange that's actually founded by some high-frequency traders). There's tons of high-frequency trading that's actually gross negative (they sell for less on average than they buy), but net positive (on average, they get paid more fees than they lose gross).
What makes a rolling landscape roll?
"It kinda hurt my dignity :-("

Yea, the Sales Prevention Department has a way of doing that.
I only added that in to be a bit more accurate; in general, I only think illegal copies are worse on average (meaning more of them have problems than "approved" copies have problems). I could continue quibbling by talking about movies copied via camera in the theater, but I won't bother; I actually do agree that in many areas the pirated copies are better all around than non-pirated copies.

The reason I felt compelled to give another analogy, though, was a another difference: the ease of making more apples / wheat / copies, in one's own backyard (or computer, as the case is). I felt that that was an essential part of the picture, missing from the wheat scenario. :)
Fair enough. I agree the numbers could be interesting. But it's quite different if you want to see users' names.

Well, a name is just a variable. If that variable can be correlated to a group status of another value within a social network, it can reveal patterns about social dynamics and even things about viral distribution of certain prominent ideas / memes / buzz-worthy topics.

It is interesting how, for example, the Google zeitgeist works, or the "trending topics" on Twitter. There are big pipes and there are small pipes, but in the oligopoly of mainstream media, it is only a select few who control the flow of data.

P.S. By "mainstream media," I mean the conglomerates who control the major networks of NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, and the other free airwaves that don't require a cable subscription payment every month.
Looks a little like google wave, only not in an "email" form.

Sign up worked for me.
You should really check out the safety features of RTGs. As one example, in 1970 the lunar module from the failed Apollo 13 mission (which had an RTG with a plutonium dioxide core) was burnt up over Fiji and dropped into the Tonga trench in the Pacific. The heat and stress of this event was far beyond anything that would happen during the launch of a spacecraft. The area where the RTG ended up is still tested for an increase in background radiation and to date nothing has shown up that would indicate that the containment vessel has leaked.
You only talk to hot girls in person?
I agree that learning takes place at a faster rate during childhood and that the non-autodidact will be at a disadvantage, especially in programming.

That said, my main disagreement was with your comment, College is probably too late to learn the fundamental techniques and mindset of programming - this was very reminiscent of the dialogue many religious groups will say about instilling church fundamentals, hence the reason I used the word 'indoctrinated', along with its connotations. As for the mindset of programming, there are many fields who are surprisingly close to the needed mindset, and still, it may be largely a personal matter in as much as some person will have the needed mindset no matter the field they choose.

I certainly have no argument over the amount of time needed to learn programming, and definitely agree that starting in college is much more difficult. It is just that I have been impressed by late learners to programming who came from other fields (mathematics/physics/economics being some of the best to draw from), and as such I can not underestimate the ability of another who came to programming later in life.
Django, mod_wsgi, Apache and OS X - Do it
Ok, that one was a little bit funny, at least.
Great! I'm a slicehost user and happy to see them here, but nice to be able to do this stuff in a non-platform specific way.
Currently, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are all in the red. They have enormous value because of their potential to make gobs of cash due to the amount of eyes that look at them everyday. The problem during the dot-com boom/bust was that ideas that were basically crap (aka. had no real users, nor much potential to get them) were getting wayyyy too much money, and were often being started and led by business types who thought they could just hire some programmers and their ideas would spring to life and make them infinitely rich. FB/YT/Twitter are all in a very different position and actually have potential to make their investors infinitely rich in the not too distant future.
Ask HN: What's Your Work Area Look Like? (Agile Coach Version)
Microsoft in new EU browser offer
That '_commerical_' support you're referring to doesn't scale worth a damn

Yeah it does. Instead of having a single official company to go to for support, you can go to multiple ones and choose the one that fits you. Competition is a good thing, right?
"Bad" in what sense and according to whom?

Chernyshevsky's "What's To Be Done" is easily one of the worst pieces of literature in history, but that didn't stop Lenin from being inspired by it. The book's major claim to fame is the infamous list of influential people who loved it, and not in that ironic "so bad it's good" way either.
U.S. marine
> > If I had an infinite supply of food, I would not think twice about handing it out to others.

> I don't know why people keep making this analogy, but it's a poor one imho.

You missed his point. It's the customers that suddenly find themselves with an infinite supply of food, for practical purposes, so why should their friends have to pay for food?
Wait... so you mean the company whose advertising slogan was "Welcome to the World Wide Wow" didn't succeed?

This story brought me much joy and happiness. Thank you very much for bringing it to my attention.
> Oh dear, I guess if we were in a bar we would now start a bar fight and hit each other over the head with beer glassed?

If we were face to face I suspect it would've gone completely differently. I don't think you'd've said what you did in the way that you did. I was simply trying to point out that you were, in my opinion, being rather more aggressive than perhaps you thought.

I accept that you didn't intend to call me a liar.

I'm not sorry you chimed in. I haven't down-mud you because I think you have added value to this thread. You have expressed a point of view. I think what you said was wrong, and I've supplied my point of view as a counter to it. The thread has been longer than I'd've liked, but that's the way it's gone.

I hope I've expressed myself clearly enough that you now understand my position, even if you might not agree with it.

Call it closed.
Best thing I ever did, hands-down.

EDIT: In terms of self-improvement. Hated every minute of it, though. :)
This is it for me. Music production, song writing, and live performances.

Also trying to save the world for my kids, but that might end up being a virtual effort so I'm not sure I can list it.
Offbeat Guides http://www.offbeatguides.com/ delivers customized travel guides for $25.

I like print magazines, but I wonder about the economics of dead trees. However a good online personalized aggregation service would be worth the price of a magazine subscription to me.
We're looking for folks who would be interested in "owning" a particular provider. Shoot us a note on the mailing list if you would like to participate! Although, patches speak louder than words. :)
Ask HN:  Does twitter depend on spammers for its success?
They do after all inflate your follower count giving you the impression that more people care about your tweets.

And since new follower email notifications are turned on by default, having spammers follow you gives twitter an opportunity to email you -- thus reminding you to keep using twitter.

Yes, twitter has to pretend that spammers are bad. Hence it will get rid of some of them occasionally.
Yes, functional programming is very similar to OO.

OO:

class SomeType {
<data> ;
SomeOtherType function1() {
this.whatever ;
...
}
}

FP:

data SomeType ...
f1 :: SomeType -> SomeOtherType
f1 this = whatever this >> ...

Same idea, different syntax. (Type classes will allow polymorphism, if that's what you're after.)

You are thinking of the abstraction in terms of its implementation. There is no reason why a method in a class would physically be in that class; the class just acts as a namespace:

class Foo { method }
Foo.method();

and

(defmethod Foo.method ...)
(Foo.method)

are the same.
Hydrogeologist
> Please show me the text that makes that claim.

You wrote that it was better than foreclosure.

> The fact that people who once got a million dollar mortgage and now can't afford an $800K mortgage is not my problem to address.

Technically, none of this is your problem. However, you claimed to be offering useful suggestions for banks' problems. Trading a loan that doesn't work for a loan that can't work doesn't help the bank.
I love and depend on the web for learning and for communication, but my most useful creative times are away from the keyboard, either mulling over ideas while walking, or scribbling notes on paper. You've got to learn what works for you and make sure you can step back from the always-on addiction.
FB/YT/Twitter ... have potential to make their investors infinitely rich in the not too distant future.

Yes, but how? And what is stopping them from doing it already?

Edit: I understand that Google is working on algorithms that will let them parse content from videos so they can include targeted ads (I've heard it suggested that Google's free 411 service is an exercise in collecting speech samples for just this purpose).
More About "Magic" in Rails
Which book did you guys stop reading recently ?

I was reading "Fooled by randomness" and just could not make myself go beyond the ~25% mark..!
I just saw this and was really moved, so just wanted to share it and see what people here thought about it. Yea I know that its really one sided and I am not advocating vegetarianism. I just wanted to share and hear what you guys had to say !!

Sorry if it isn't appropriate here !!
The split screen life (experience with myvu shades + ipod touch)
Justin Frankel actually technically worked for AOL (via Nullsoft) when he wrote Gnutella and WASTE. Probably the best things to come out of AOL (by proxy) in the last decade. (Not that they didn't try to stop it, either).
Associated Press will try to implement DRM on browser-viewable text
I don't consider it an inefficiency as much as a parasitic loss. All those man-in-the-middle fragments are being scooped up and funneled to one entity.
Sticking up for Facebook's use of user photos in ads
As much as I agree that voting should be used to indicate value to the discussion and not agreement with one's own opinion, I think it is a hopeless cause. It requires that participants curtail their instincts for the sake of the greater good, an unlikely prospect in the best of circumstances, much less in a community of semi-anonymous strangers.

I think it better to simply suggest that people not take scores so damn seriously. To stop interpreting them as a measure of thoughtfulness or truthfulness and start thinking of them as just a reflection of people's attention.
This isn't just constrained to programmers. I have a friend I met while she was a physics post-doc at MIT and who now is a professor at Cornell and runs a large research group. When asked what work she does at parties she answers "teacher".
Your response in no way addresses what I said -- MS didn't act out of empathy, b/c corporations have none -- they don't have a "heart" b/c they are persons only by law.

As to the Cisco cite -- how is that relevant to MS? Moreover, copying software code is not a criminal offense -- it's a civil tort. Finally, equitable estoppel is not a matter of negotiation, it's a matter of one party's unilateral acts.
sounds a lot like mine magazine. https://www.timecmg.com/mine/

its not quite the same, but its in the same vein, and it does produce a nice product.
How on earth can one pronounce "PubSubHubHub" in a conversation?
[Disclaimer - I work for Windows Azure]

I think this is a great library and I would love to see it work with Windows Azure. Windows Azure doesn't have a service management API today (we only have storage APIs) but we are working on one and we'll have it by the end of the year[1].

I do think it'll need some changes to work with us (or with AppEngine for that matter) since libcloud seems to deal with raw nodes and Windows Azure likes to deal with 'services' as the first class entity with the raw nodes/machines/VMs/whatever just being various instances of something we call 'roles'. I think you could kind of hack around that in your code but it wouldn't be very elegant.

[1] I'm the person responsible for them so feel free to reach out to me. I can't reveal much of how it will look like in public yet though.
I was thinking morgue, but kennel is probably more accurate.
Motorcycle Mechanic or Baker.
Agree with Grandmaster Birt -

That NYT writer has become a real renewable energy Concern troll: always whining about some so-called unsolvable problem for renewable energy at the NYT Green Inc blog - it should be called Brown Inc.
I released some software as open source. I'd developed it on OpenBSD. People quite reasonably wanted to run it on Linux.

Trouble is, running on Linux turned out to be more than just a port to "Linux". It ended up being a port to an annoying amount of distributions.

You can't even rely on Linux being compatible with Linux. :-(
Web Programming Foo
If downvotes are used for disagreement, then I have to read them in order to know if they are relevant. If downvotes are saved only for irrelevant, one-liners, me-too's, etc., then I can safely ignore them.
Cabinet maker or mechanic specializing in restoration, bar tender, chef, teacher, politician, or counselor. I don't have the chops for it but "golf pro" would be a job that might combine all of the above in a good way.
> You were doing so well until you decided to trail off on a completely unrelated racist (nationalist?) hate-fest against Americans...

I take it you're an American? :)

BTW, I expected lots of downvotes for that post, but oh well.

I can't see my remark about possibly being Ah-merr-ih-can as racist though, but it's always a good accusation to throw around. It's not a hate-fest either. As you most likely understood, I implied that some people might be willing to overlook MS's evil because it's an American company, as in, out of patriotism or something.

As a people, you(?) do seem to be prone to indulging overreacting. Take "Sodomayor is a reverse-racist" for example. Or the heated discussion around abortion.

> MS isn't a gigantic living organism with a single brain - there are a lot of teams in a company the size of Microsoft, each with different leadership and goals. Some will be friendly to open source, others will not.

I believe I addressed this by saying not everyone in MS is evil. But if you look closely, you'll discover that it's really freaking difficult to deny MS's actions as a company being evil.

> It's easy to paint an entire group of people with a broad brush and see the world as black and white, but then you'd also be wrong.

Right, black and white. The truth/reality is often pretty straightforward though. As for painting an entire group of people with a broad brush, see my original comment about not everyone working for MS being evil.
In the 26 years I've been a California resident, the drama of drafting
a budget has been a perennial event. In just a handful of years, when we enjoyed
an unexpected windfall of taxes, is the budget enacted without gimmicks and
raiding the funds of other state and local agencies.

It's popular to lay the blame at the foot of Prop 13 and the requirement of
a supermajority to pass the budget, but the real cause of our enduring
fiscal crisis lies with the 120 members of the State Assembly and Senate.

Our state representatives never saw a spending bill they didn't like. Especially
since in political calculus $$ equals votes. It's quite popular to spend
money on some crackpot idea then issue a press release bragging how a
representative is 'doing something' about the problem.

In the occasional year where we have an unexpected surplus do we use the money
to pay down our existing debt or bank it in anticipation of a future rainy day?
No, we spend it on new projects, but we don't simply spend it, we float bond
issues which obligate us to spend a like amount of money yearly over 30 years.
Our base spending level keeps growing. We have no flexability to spend less
during a bad year because of entitlements like school spending (which by
constitutional amendment consume approx 40% of the budget), existing debt
service and third-rail special interest issues.

Our representatives exhibit the drug seeking behavior of addicts,
pawning a neighbor's tv to buy their next fix. But, it's not crack or PCP that
that has them in it's deadly grip. It's money. Cold. Hard. Cash.

Our elected representatives in California are boxed into a corner. Any
move they might take to cut spending risks alienating the special interest
groups that dole out the political contributions. Take prisions, for example.
In California we incarcerate a larger percentage of our population than most other states (moreso than some countries, even). Our spending on prisions is nearly
equal to what we spend on education. (Yet, our prison health care system has been
put in the hands of a trustee by the federal courts, since we have been killing
one prisoner per day due to inadequate prison health care). Any attempt
to cut prision spending (and thus endangering the employment of members of
the CCPOA union) brings immediate and harsh retribution by CCPOA.

So, don't blame Prop13 or the supermajority rule. Even if those were not a
factor, we'd still be lurching from crisis to crisis, but we'd have tax rates
that are double of what they are now...

Joe McGuckin
This seems like it would be decent application for the modern cargo dirigibles that have had so many false starts recently.

e.g. http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/11/boeings-skyhook-jhl-40-bl...
Uninformed opinion-spouting? Well, what makes you so sure you're not engaging in some yourself? What if all he's saying about MS is true?

The guy seems to be really well informed. He's definitely pro-Apple though, I'll give you that, but he's really insightful too.

There was another site I happened to see through HN that kept a good chronicle of MS's evil, but I didn't save a bookmark so I had to go with RoughlyDrafted. Sorry! :p
It is true, we're initially targeting providers that will give you a "server via API call". When you're developing against AppEngine (and I imagine Azure), you're committing to that platform, because it is very very specific. Whereas when you develop against Amazon or Slicehost, the server is the common unit ... which you are free to do whatever you like with.

That said, I think there is a lot of room for a similar project with storage. Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files ... and maybe Azure will fit in there?

As for libcloud, we're trying to provide a DBI like thing for cloud server providers. It's not the end-all solution, but it is a clean first step towards cloud portability.
Did you mean repetition?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=719408
I could not agree more. Now that iTunes has dropped DRM, I have paid for all my music since then. The last time I copied something, there were no non-DRM version on iTunes and Amazon was not selling the non-DRM version in Canada. So as a last resort I took a Torrent. Give me an easy way to pay you for what I want and you'll get my money.
> Competition is a good thing, right?

The parent was referring to "scaling" for businesses, not consumers.

Competition is good as long as it's driven by quality, not price. A competition on price can be good for products, but then again, it's only good when your lowering the price by improving the quality of the manufacturing process ... I don't think anyone will be happy if Apple goes bankrupt or stops producing IPhones because of cheap knockoffs made in China.

In the case of support, people only want to pay the minimum amount they can for their needs to be met. If you want to provide quality services, you'll have a hard time doing that when your customers will discover that they don't need it and outsource their operations to India.

This happens because few pieces of software really need paid support. For an open-source project, in many cases you'll get better support from its mailing list than from a commercial entity. Only companies with enough money will pay for high-quality support ... and they'll only do it for peace of mind and for passing the blame. Not to mention that B2B products are quite boring and support can also be provided by cheap labor.
Simon's testimony before congress a few months back was easily one of the most powerful speeches I have heard in a long time. They will chronicle it in future editions of "Great American Speeches".

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/7/david_simon_creator_of_...
Your thanks and our shared dream made my week.

May your branches always be heavily laden.
FBI Lab Processes 150,000 Fingerprint Sets a Day
It's not the Recession, you Just Suck
If you actually look up some of the authors in the first issue http://math.rejecta.org/vol1-num1 , you'll see that some of them are pretty legit scientists (eg Stephen Boyd who has a very nice book on convex optimization on his website)
I prefer "design" or "build" or "make" software. Saying "write code" or "program" makes me feel dirty because I'm terribly insecure and don't want people thinking I'm a typist.

But, I make two exceptions:

1. When I'm speaking to engineers I prefer to say I "engineer software" just to get a rise out of them.

2. When I'm speaking to the elderly, I've learned "I tell computers what to do" is all they care to hear.
Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's my age. Mabye I'm not self-reflexive enough. Maybe I never give it enough of an actual, honest try. Maybe my life is more balanced than I think. But I've _never_ been able to identify with articles like this.

I often don't have enough hours in the day to even get what I want done. I _love_ software. I'd rather be coding than doing most other things. I code for my startup 10-12 hours a day, then go home and work on my OS. Or learning Haskell. Or thinking about writing a compiler. Or the "living imageboard" idea I've been tossing around. Or whatever. And I've been doing this for years. Through school, I was coding projects all day, rather than doing it in my startup. I've been coding over 2/3rds of my life at this point, and I don't really want to stop.

Now, I do have other interests, and I persue other things. It's entirely possible that I just feel like I'm on the computer as much as these authors say they are, and I'm really not. I usually have a female companion. I love mountain biking. I paint Warhammer armies. I'm involved in the local hackerspace. I'm just a busy dude. But I still need (close to) unlimited texting for Twitter. I still was all about Facebook when it first came out. I still have almost 300 feeds in my reader (which I only tend to skim, admittedly.) And yet I never feel like this.

I grew up on a farm. When I was younger, my computing resources were quite limited, so I did that. I played outside. I was in the boy scouts. But I've never really held the opinion that the "real world" is more important or of inherently better quality than the virtual one. I feel terrible when I _don't_ have my phone. Or when I can't check my email. Or when I haven't caught up on my reading for a few days.

I'm not sure. Maybe I'll feel differently in the future. Only time will tell, I guess.