skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah and unfortunately there comes a time when you have to admit that the entire premise of the project was flawed and it's time to liquidate and start-up a new.
I wonder if you could write poetry with block indentation to designate these things and have it come across as obvious and meaningful.
I'd be curious how he balances his wealth and investments with being publicly elected - I know the U.S. President has to put most of his investments into a blind trust or some such once elected, what's it like for the mayor of NYC? Lots of old associates must want his council, lots of people must want him to invest, and so on. It must be a challenge to manage that and his post.

If I asked along these lines, I'd take a long, long time to make sure it was phrased in a very friendly way - if it comes across minorly accusing, even at all, you'll probably get a politician non-answer. Heck, you might anyways. But I'd be fascinated to learn how someone balances being a billionaire and running one of the busiest cities in the world.
I asked a few questions (albeit silly ones) but got no answer.
On the one hand, the physicist counterpart sets a high conversational bar. On the other hand, even in academia the "computer science is fixing computers" misconception and the lack of awareness of theoretical aspects to computer science are very pervasive; this is a good resource.

Additionally, I'm happy to see my academic pick-up fantasy played out. :)
I hope that if I ever have a company this well-funded, my idea is exciting enough that I won't have to lure high-profile talent like this. Because stuff like this is probably not going to help a company get in the black. I know, this is a very utilitarian way of looking at things...food is very important! But regardless, I'd rather replace the two top chefs with a designer and developer. This sort of luxury can wait for when times are good.
The person who submitted that particular issue is a pretty active HN user (DarkShikari).
Avi, who's from Vancouver, seems to have very similar accent and body language to the people I know from Toronto; (I lived there for a year). I find this interesting.
Not to be snarky, but the fact that it has become straightforward to build Sinatra as an extension to Rails is one of the things I don't like about Rails.
TokBox & EtherPad: Video Chat Gets Real-Time Document Editing
A very interesting physical hack. Perhaps a taste of things to come!
Seems very buggy, and very thin. I did not get useful answers to any questions.
I'm not sure if it's really such a huge problem, or if people mistakenly believe it to be a problem
I've had a similar experience to yours. I grew up with an alcoholic and domestically violent father in a poverty stricken neighborhood. I was encouraged to go to college by a girlfriend of all things. I graduated in the lower half of my class and scored only a 900 on my SAT but despite this I finished my BS with a 3.55 overall GPA and a 4.0 in computer science. I'm currently working on my Master's degree.

I also feel like my intelligence is average but what helped me succeed is how much I enjoyed all my computer science courses.
It seems like the attitude in those posts is of someone looking to litigate. They would have to tell their lawyers where MediaCoder is breaking the GPL so why not just tell the MediaCoder author and check later if it's compliant?

Seems like pretty shameful behaviour to me.
"I have a low tolerance for greedy people trying to use ideas for their benefit rather than societies."

Generally the most sustainable way to benefit yourself is by benefiting society...produce a product/service people will buy (which they buy because it achieves some end at a cost they're willing to pay).
Is anyone else as bummed as I am at the thought of having to hear the phrase "augmented reality" bandied about for the next 5-20 years?
This is a situation where something being free or cheap creates negative value. I get contacted through my LinkedIn account every once and a while because someone was looking for a bilingual programmer and we're rare as hen's teeth in my language pair and region. I have never actually been in the market for a new job, but they're typically pitching jobs which would be fairly attractive to me if I was.

I don't get spammed daily by someone who searched for "All programmers listing Java experience" because LinkedIn's business model forces people to a) be serious about hiring from it (or you wouldn't be spending a few hundred dollars) and b) be selective about who you contact (rather than casting a dragnet).
The Myth Behind Craigslist: It's Not Maximizing Revenue Potential
There's just a huge difference between the way those two companies do business. Microsoft builds things. Cisco buys them. They may have comparable positions in their respective sectors, but they have utterly unrelated business development models.
Yes? No? Who cares? Take it to motleyfool.
Do you think this is more or less wrong than simply halting the instance?

If they had reason to believe his instance was impacting other users or their network, then halting the instance (preferably after contacting him about the problem, which seems to have happened) would not have been wrong at all. So, logging in after he'd asked them not to is definitely the "more wrong" of the two options. I tend to think it was an honest mistake made by a support tech who was having a bad/busy day rather than an attempt to violate any (real or imagined) privacy pact that the company had made with Aaron.

As I've mentioned a few times here, the default expectation of hosting customers is that the host will login to find and fix problems. From the perspective of most hosting customers, that is part of the service they are paying for (and they pay more to get more of it, as in the case of RackSpace), and if it were missing they would be angry and leave. My guess is that the tech at Rimu simply didn't remember or notice that Aaron had requested no one ever login to his box.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that, as someone that is deeply familiar with this industry, when I read the shitstorm that has been kicked up here over this (extremely minor) incident, I'm just stunned and baffled. This is seriously a tempest in a teapot, if ever I saw one.

Yes, your hosting provider should respect your privacy, to the best of their ability to do so while shepherding their shared resources responsibly to provide the best service to each of their customers. But, there is no accusation of theft of data; no reason to believe Rimuhosting acted inappropriately with the access they had; no reason to think it was done maliciously or completely without warning (Aaron admits he'd talked with them in the past about the issue); and no reason to think Rimuhosting was trying to piss anyone off.

Not being thoroughly informed about a customer's wishes is pretty much all one can accuse them of here.
What the hell is he talking about, the first Matrix movie is better than the sequels.
Updated AWS/Go Daddy dedicated server cost comparison
Many organized criminals would be happy to spend the cost of five PCs in order to access government computers, said Steve Santorelli, director of investigations with security consultancy Team Cymru. "What is a netbook? $700? You send five of them; you're dropping three grand, and say you get into the Congressional e-mail system. How valuable would that be?"

What? No they wouldn't. It's a Rube Goldberg attack. And what does it get you? Access to "the Congressional email system"?

My guess is there's a referral fee they're getting for placing the orders, or that it's a prank.
Loftus and Matt Buchanan are quite good. I hope they'e getting paid a lot, because being associated with the likes of Jesus Diaz is not what I'd call a career- or even life-enhancing.
"..., because government almost never creates value". Note, not the US Government, but literally, a government.

I didn't quite make the claim that he advocates anarchy, but I am questioning his attitude of trying to have and to eat his cupcake.
When you have a good job, good food and good company times are nearly always good.

I'm sure the varied interesting diet pays off in staff motivation and happiness.
I disagree.

Personally, no matter how much work I have to do, the single most difficult thing I ever have to do is to get fed. Whether it's shopping, packing, cooking, traveling to a restaurant, waiting in line, etc., etc., etc., nothing is a bigger pain in the ass. And that's just for mediocre food, not good stuff like this. If I had something like this, my productivity would probably double. Multiply that by x employees and suddenly, these chefs are the bargain of the century.
So far so good over here :)
CPU is one of the easiest things to throttle in Xen. there's no reason why the provider should care at all that you are running as much cpu as they let you. Proper use of the credit scheduler means this happens without administrator intervention.

You can also gracefully limit disk bandwidth and network bandwidth from the dom0, without ever getting a shell in the DomU.
Well, not quite. It's $30 for unlimited texts on family plan, split between 5 people. I pay $6 for unlimited texts, not $20. Still your point is valid. It's still just data and should be charged at data rates.
> Since when has stupidity disqualified legislation from being passed into law?

I must admit, you got me there.
Wouldn't that be "I pity the fool who breaks the two second rule"?
Under no circumstances should you use a double negative for emphasis. It has the opposite effect.
Chrome/IE8 actually do a reasonable job of addressing this by greying out everything but the domain in the address bar. Its something I'd like to see in FF -- if anyone knows of an add-on to do this let me know.
I disagree entirely. The best hackers can work anywhere they want, why not work at a place that cares and provides for their employees.
The article just seems to be putting Rails 3 design improvements to the test. Personally, I am pretty impressed at how easy it is to swap out Routes/ActionController::Base if you need something leaner or just a completely different approach to routing requests. Remember when we were all banging our heads against a wall with Struts? What's not to like?
"Amazon Remembers" is a mechanical turk in extreme cases
Real persons at Amazon look at submitted pictures and try to find product matches. An very interesting experiment reveals.
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This is the ultimate international cell phone for people who want to be connected to the music they love. No other cell phone emphasizes A.M. and F.M. radio like this unlocked cell phone does.
I guess that the food around their offices stinks...I've never felt the way you do about the DC area. Either way, I'm not suggesting that they do away with the cafeteria, but they probably should avoid breaking the bank on it.
The good things is that one doesn't have to be gifted to do well in life. What matters are the values a person holds and how well they treat others, but unfortunately being a good person alone doesn't put food on the table. Work hard.
It's better the same way that your apartment complex manager turning off the water to your apartment if there's a problem is better than going inside when you explicitly told him not to, checking all your faucets, and going through your underwear drawer, when you're not there.
My $.02: I find that it's much more useful to know who made the comment (at least in the sense of a handle that allows me to easily read their other comments and submissions) than their karma score or the karma score for the comment. I find the leaderboard the least useful and would rather do away with it than karma for individual comments.
I've studied psychology, sociology and some medical care and am in no way a licensed professional (I'm purely debating on what I know, there are likely doctors far more knowledgeable on this subject, but as yet there have been no scientific studies on the behaviour effects, so anything other than infection prevalence and the acute symptoms of toxoplasmosis are wild speculation anyway), so I got into reading journals on them all (plus magazines like New Scientist), so personally I'd recommend journals if you can. The Lancet (which is essentially the medical journal in the UK) is a quality journal; I know they had an article on prenatal toxoplasmosis treatment, a good one IIRC, in the first half of 2007.

Other than that, I'd say a quality medical dictionary or an excellent anatomy textbook like Gray's Anatomy wouldn't do you harm for the inquisitive mind. There are lots of texts out there, once you get acquainted with some it becomes easier to find others.

I personally believe you're better of understanding your body and medicine, because if you ever get sick you're stuck relying on another human being and not a living embodiment of scientific facts. You're never going to know something doesn't sound right, if you don't know what your doctor is talking about. I'd also add, always get a second opinion for even moderate care issues (if you can, I live in Canada and grew up in the UK with Universal Healthcare, I'm aware this isn't necessarily practical for everyone in the US who may read this), or at least find and discuss your medical concerns with others, it can sometimes help. I realised my psoriasis wasn't eczema (which I was originally diagnosed with) when I noticed the difference between mine and all the other kids, like I've said elsewhere it spread to 20% of my body because I was told it was benign. I knew a girl with 70% coverage because she'd been misdiagnosed; a single flare-up of her 'eczema' caused her to breakout over nearly her entire torso and needed hospitalization for about a month to get it under control.
Agreed. It's also a good reason to use different hard drives. My preference is to have the failure tolerance and backups, but not have to use it to recover from a head crash.
So they're just using it as a technique to get a discount? That's terrible :-(
I find that interesting too - in general, I find the Vancouver accent to be closer to other places on the west coast (Seattle, Portland, SF) than to the eastern Canadian accents. But there are no doubt also elements that correlate with country instead of coast, and you must be picking up on those.

I also speak faster and am more animated in interviews than I would be in most other situations, which probably pushes me farther towards the east coast stereotypes than I am in "real life"...
If they were freely copyable, and you had a more pressing need for that $3 than any of them, I'd say go for it. If you have to steal them from someone, on the other hand, you should probably refrain from actually taking away their candies, crackers, and sandwiches.

Your analogy sucks.
You forgetting the teamwork benefits. When there is good food, teams will come together and chat it up. The lunch hour at the cafeteria can be conducive to productivity. People catch up on what their team is doing or spark new ideas on the back of napkins. Munching on food and tossing ideas around with colleagues in a casual environment is my preferred way for generating original ideas.

Or let's talk some rough math... it's all about time saved. If you are saving your employees 30 minutes each from grabbing food or making it, that could be 30 minutes more of producitivity. A chef would only need to serve 16 people to redeem his eight hours of pay. The article says a kitchen staff of 50 serves 800, that means every person is serving about 16 people. That staff probably also makes less than your average employee it all adds up to easy ROI.

Edit: wordiness, then grammar, then spelling, then wordiness and grammar again.
I assume The Turk was being funny rather than actually being from Alcatraz?
The Zynga founder is all about the lean startup and "going ghetto" but he says that food is really important so even his lean startup (which employs many MVP testing practices) has a good chef and good food. He'll go cheap on everything else though, including developers... because often good developers want to work where they can eat good food, even if the pay is lower than market rate.
It's very interesting. This Jane St. video had a big influence on my decision to spend some time learning ocaml:

http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/61
A sysadmin is like a member of the pit crew at the Formula One races. Don't admit anyone who is under-qualified, lacking practical experience and education.

I carry a notebook (dead-tree version) and take copious notes of before and after states, note each step taken and ALWAYS backup configuration files before changing them. Where applicable I snapshot configurations before and after listing, etc to a directory for that session.

If you are using service/consulting firms, watch-out! Over time they will send ever less experienced staff in their attempt to rack up profits. It never ends well. Eventually a simple mistake takes out a critical part of your infrastructure and they'll assign blame to some absolutely incredible and unrelated factor.
Though I'm a big fan of self-discipline, I worry this study tells us more about eighth grade than human nature.
Reports indicate that the $29 version will install on a clean machine just fine, no need to install Leopard first. It's kind of an honor system thing with Apple.
You're right, of course, I just think it's ironic that he'd use Sinatra as an example, because Sinatra is what people run to when they get freaked out by Rails complexity.
xm sched-credit -d username -w 10

would have solved the CPU problem without doing anything more than slowing down the heavy user. Giving each guest a single CPU rather than all CPUs on the box also helps a lot. In fact, if your 'bad' user bought the same percentage of the box as everyone else, if you left the weights at their default levels, that user would get approximately their fair share of CPU.

Tip: if you don't dedicate a core to the Dom0, you will have problems if anyone else uses much cpu, disk, or network.

If you want to do the same for network, simply use tc: http://wiki.xen.prgmr.com/xenophilia/2008/06/traffic-shaping... - if your problem is disk, use ionice: http://wiki.xen.prgmr.com/xenophobia/2008/06/using-ionice1-t...

The whole point of providing Xen instances is that I don't want to muck around in your instance. It pisses you off, and it wastes my time. That's why I'm using xen, and not OpenVZ or some other glorified chroot. From the point of view of a provider, handling everything within the Dom0 not only makes customers more comfortable, it's also less work for you, the provider.
The MediaCoder author would be a great example of such a person.

If the author of MediaCoder uses someone else's software, it's quite reasonable he obeys their rules for that software. He obvisously didn't read the licence for the software (even when asked multiple times). He even makes claims about various software being in the public domain.

Seriously the ffmpeg authors are quite within their rights to be rude to someone VIOLATING THEIR COPYRIGHT. You make it sound like MediaCoder author is the injured party - he is not.
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I'm with you on that one. Especially with current crop of huge disks. Volume groups should be resources which you carve up into logical volumes. Personally, I prefer to assign a separate LV to each application, DB tablespace. I also configure LVs to the current requirements and grow them as required. Have never seen a system that grows the way you expect it to.

With LVs you can also move things around without disrupting things. I often move running databases from JBOD to SAN using LV mirroring.
When I was looking for a job I'd find a potential job, then used LinkedIn to find who at that company I had some possible connection to. That was incredibly valuable.
At least it's less bullshit than what Jaron Lanier spewed for decades
I half-expect this to turn out to be some sort of 4chan prank. Maybe ordering the laptops with credit card information obtained from all of those 'christian dating site' emails/passwords.

On the other hand, it might not be the hackers themselves that are trying to get network access. It could be China/North Korea/etc. But that's treading into tinfoil hat territory.
Yes, and this would have been the correct way to fix the situation. Gracefully reduce the available CPU for the offending VPS, and notify the customer.

Breaking in is OK as a last resort.
> I'll promise to read up on it, if you'll learn the meaning of "not even close".

I don't see how "I know you are, but what am I?" is a very strong argument.

> I will merely mention that most hosting provider customers not only accept this kind of thing, they demand it.

Give it to customers who want it. Don't ask someone if he wants it, get a "no" answer, then turn around and do it anyway. The former is good customer service. The latter is shady and underhanded.

> The default mode for hosting providers is to drop in on the box within a couple of comments in their ticketing system...if it can't be solved with one or two replies, then it's safest to simply drop in and fix it. For most hosting customers this is not an invasion of privacy or "breaking in", it is "great support".

Most hosting customers don't have explicit suggestions from the host that if they don't want the hosting provider logging in to the system they can remove their SSH keys -- and, more to the point, most hosting customers don't do that then find out the hosting provider's support personnel have been rooting around (pardon the pun) in their data anyway.

It's "breaking in" in this case only because the SSH key for access was removed, with the hosting provider's blessing, and they basically leveraged a local access vulnerability to give themselves root access.

If the hosting provider had a policy that forbade customers from obstructing host administrators from logging in to the machine, articulated in the terms and conditions of use, I'd say go for it -- but that's not the situation in this case at all.

> Finally, as a security professional, I'm sure you're also aware that with access to the hardware, your host has root all the time.

In principle, sure -- but when there's a clearly encouraged expectation of privacy, it's really bad form to break in to the system against the customer's wishes by virtue of having access to the hardware. That's a betrayal of trust.

> Even more interestingly, the host also has the ability to login, poke around, and never tell you about it (and not leave a trail...just boot up a live CD, mount up the disk read only, and poke around til their heart's content).

Indeed. The fact it wasn't kept secret in this case just shows how little they value the customer's request that they don't log in to the system with root privileges and muck about with the customer's data. I didn't say they were necessarily malicious about it -- but that doesn't mean it's not bad.

> With someone else having access to the hardware, you have nothing but good faith on the part of the hosting provider.

. . . or, in this case, bad faith.
Thanks! You've answered my question completely(and then some).
I grew up in Ontario and have lived in BC for 6 years now, and find the accents quite different. Most Ontarians I know here agree.
One thing that has always struck me as odd is the convention of calling theoretical discussions on the nature of information 'Computer Science' but calling discussions of computers 'Information Science'.
True. But would it be too far-fetched to claim that the quality of a website / blog can be indirectly measured by the quality of its comments? A quality blog should not tolerate certain comments which are more appropriate for YouTube.