skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your arguments against copyright are so solid that they appear to change with each comment you make.

Cory Doctorow may care a lot about Steamboat Willie, but the overwhelming majority of copyright scofflaws do not; they're downloading new release movies and music. What evidence can you present that they're doing this as a statement against the Sonny Bono act? Because you're making an extraordinary claim: that people who are picking up movie torrents from torrent search engines are doing so as a political statement.

Your second argument is just as specious. What is lost when a penniless student downloads a song? Not much. What is lost when every penniless student downloads a song? Tens of millions of dollars. Moreover, you have no evidence to present that most downloaders "can't afford" what they're taking, and are thus creating some kind of media social safety net on the P2P networks.

People download because technology has, for the time being, made it easier to download than to buy. That simple fact has no bearing on whether it's right to download without buying.

A lot of things that clearly need to be illegal (for instance: credit card fraud) have also been made vastly easier by technology.
3 things I noticed (not sure if it affects the conclusions):

1. Interesting that neither article (this or the WSJ post) seems to include data on mobile carriers or handset providers. Not sure why that is.

2. Entertainment seems to be the only category that's primarly B2C companies. Almost seems like it doesn't fit. If you're going to include video game makers, why can't you also include Netflix and other such companies.

3. I wonder how much acquisitions have affected these numbers.
If you had been able to make yourself work on chess problems, even if you didn't like them, you would have been better at chess.
The site uses uses @font-face to download Fertigo. You do not need it installed.
Inside the "Inside the Python GIL" Presentation
Nowhere does apotheon actually advocate that copyright law is wrong, because that would be boring. Instead, he's set up a passive-aggressive straw man argument. Which is my point.
Fog detected on Titan
It's good to hear that your only lasting effect is a tiny blind spot; can you yourself observe it, or is it only noticeable on an eye exam?

Histoplasmosis IIRC is caused by a fungus spore. It's common in the ground everywhere, however in certain areas it's a lot more prevalent for some reason, I believe the states surrounding the Ohio and Mississippi rivers are the main place in North America. It's apparently on 80% of peoples skin in these areas, which is similar to ringworm (another fungus) in most people. However dirt infused with bird or bat droppings are a hotbed, so chicken litter of infected chickens is the common source for most humans. The only time fungi usually cause problems is when they get out of control, and dealing with infected guano is probably a good bet. IIRC it's usually an inhaled infection (causes something like pneumonia) but sometimes, often children, accidentally rub it into their eyes.

I had a severe outbreak of ringworm, my doctor told me it was highly contagious and I likely caught it from my dog. My dog was clean and when I visited a dermatologist he told me that because I have psoriasis the ringworm fungus basically struck it lucky and got through the skin. Incidentally the ringworm 'cured' my psoriasis (it used to cover about 20% of my torso and limbs, now I don't have a single patch).
How did you find it? Well done.

PG's my hero, but how would you escape the negative sign below for a Google search so it works:

"-9 points by pg" site:news.ycombinator.com

I haven't had much success.
Are the samples cooled to near zero when scanning like this? As far as I understand, even slight temperatures cause molecules to move at ridiculous speeds.
Gaining root in such an underhanded manner against the client's wishes is bordering on criminal behavior. It doesn't get much worse than that.

Of course, I write about security professionally. Maybe I have a different perspective on what constitutes unacceptable behavior than you have.
Expert systems are everywhere, actually; it's just that nobody hypes them much any more.
So you're advocating simply ignoring the laws you don't approve of?

It seems arguable that this is a moral obligation. Going out of your way to comply with laws you disapprove of strengthens those laws you disapprove of -- it's self-contradictory. If you, in the course of going about your normal life, happen to comply because it's what you would do anyway, I don't think this means you have an obligation to break those laws, but ignoring them is probably best, unless it has other consequences you can't afford.
But they had already capped his CPU usage. I see only 3 possibilities:

* Their cap failed to actually cap his CPU usage. In this case their incompetence is at fault.

* They failed to make the cap restrictive enough. In which case, they should have just further limited his max actual CPU usage.

* The box is actually well oversold on the number of clients that are on it, and there is no possible way to 'cap' someone's CPU usage to within a reasonable level while being able to allow that person to use 100% of their cap without issue. In this case, it's also their fault for over-selling the box and for misrepresenting what a cap means (and their policy regarding caps).
Webkit + Macruby = Manipulating the DOM right from Ruby
I have used the Singapore Math materials for all of my four children. My oldest has been a state champion on AMC tests and a member of our state's ARML "A" team. Most of the best students in my weekend supplemental math classes got their grounding in math through the Singapore Primary Mathematics series.

I have to strenuously disagree with yet another stupid comment from an American schoolteacher about international comparions in education, quoted in the submitted article:

"Gail Burrill, a former president of the NCTM, suggests quite bluntly that the success of Singapore Math cannot be imported. 'These are books used by a different culture, a culture that is more homogeneous, and a culture that has a consistent way of thinking about mathematics.'"

To call Singapore "more homogenous" than the United States, in an educationally relevant sense, is beneath contempt. Singapore's population consists of a minority of Malay people descended from the historically earliest inhabitants of that region, and a majority of ethnic Chinese inhabitants who are mostly the descendants of indentured plantation workers. But there are also descendants of Indian plantation workers. In fact, Singapore is the only country in the WORLD that has four different official languages (English, Modern Standard Chinese, Malay, and Tamil) from four different language families, and people born in my generation most likely spoke NONE of those languages at home, being predominantly speakers of other Sinitic languages (or possibly other Indian languages) not mutually comprehensible with the official languages, and certainly not cognate with English, the sole language of school instruction. Singapore's achievement in school math instruction is as if we suddenly switched the language of instruction in the United States to Arabic but expected all pupils to keep up with school instruction.

But, yes, sigh, the Singapore Math materials are hard for United States elementary teachers to use, because they mostly don't know even very elementary arithmetic.

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

"The understanding of the area of a rectangle and its relationship to multiplication underlies an understanding not only of the multiplication algorithm but also of the commutative law of multiplication, the distributive law, and the many more complicated area formulas. Yet in my first visit in 1986 to a K-6 elementary school, I discovered that not a single teacher knew how to find the area of a rectangle."
This is just another article about the well-established practice of using statistical analysis to compare texts, or to try to determine if a sequence of symbols even might be a language in the first place. In fact, several sentences in the article flatly contradict its headline; the programs being used have absolutely no ability to 'decdode' anything; they are entirely agnostic with respect to any potential meaning.
I wonder what would happen if they asked people who were facing backwards on the bus?
Zynga, Facebook, Myspace.
Yes, given the resolution of the image, I am guessing it must have been performed at UHV, ULT and vibration free room.
I signed up with RimuHosting a few months ago, since everyone was raving about their competent and responsive support. So far it has been a mixed bag for me. They offered to set up some services for me when I was signing up (a monitoring service and a pop3 server). Whoever was setting these up did a horrible job; I'm talking about basic mistakes in the config files that prevented these services from even working. So I would not trust RimuHosting to set up anything on my server.

On the other hand, when I experienced weird routing problems between my machine and my home, Rimu eventually offered to move me to a more expensive London VPS at the same price, even though the dropped packets were not their fault. So they are willing to go out of their way to make a customer happy.

As I said, a mixed bag. I'm not planning on changing hosts anytime soon.
Have been noticing an reasonable number of articles or advice from executives that emphasize not mixing family and business. Perhaps they didn't get the memo.
Another interesting thing from this is that it sounds like they will be awarding grand prizes for the best entry at set deadlines. In the first contest you had to improve on Cinematch by 10% to qualify to win the grand prize.
It would be easy as hell for me to shoot the hinges off a neighbor's door with a shotgun, wander inside, and turn off all the lights. That doesn't make it right.
I'm working on an ahead of time compiler for Ruby as a sort of bastard child of my "Writing a compiler in Ruby" article series, and yes, PICs will be one of many essential steps to get decent performance out of Ruby (far down the list though, as I'm still far from having something that works :) ). I believe the Rubinius guys have been looking at PICs or similar methods as well.

You can actually do better in many cases, by using C++ style vtables which only requires an array lookup. The are two caveats with vtables for Ruby: Since all objects inherit from Object, all classes need a vtable large enough to hold all methods known at compile time, and secondly you need a fallback mechanism to handle method names not known at compile time. The size overhead is actually not necessarily so bad for typical apps - my compiler itself would have a vtable overhead of about 40K ("vasted" vtable slots) but the hash approach also have (smaller) overheads so the total amount of memory wasted is even lower.

You also need to handle re-definition of methods at compile time, but that's a simple matter of propagating the vtable change down the inheritance hierarchy until you reach the bottom or a subclass that has already overloaded the method (Prof. Michael Franz, who's one of the guys behind "trace trees" which is also gaining traction in the JS world wrote a report on using that method to add runtime interface - or protocol - changes to Oberon back in 93 I think). It makes dynamic method redefinition slower, but that's far more rare than dynamic method calls.

There are other parts that are trickier. You can redefine Fixnum for example, which means that you need to either do lots of analysis and have a fallback prepared, use type tagging (like MRI) or make integers actual objects. The alternatives are either difficult (analysis+fallback), bloats and slows your code (type tags and objects) and/or causes extra memory usage and pressure on your FC (making integers real objects).

You also have the "require" problem. A common Ruby idiom is to loop over a directory and require all files in it. Do you require it at compile time, or at runtime? Granted, that part is easier for a JIT (though even an ahead of time compiler for Ruby will need to include either a small VM or a JIT to handle eval and completely dynamic require/load's)

Not to mention the fun little issue of code executing in a class definition, meaning you don't actually even know what methods a class has without potentially executing code. Heck, for a really pathological case, more than one Ruby ORM establishes a database connection and executes queries in the class definition in order to add methods to the class then and there.

All of this makes Ruby really painful to compile efficiently since you know so little about the program without actually executing it.
Ask HN: WHy is my computer typing by itself?
I have tried anti virus, anti trojan, turned off speech recognition, tryin to disable text to speech narator, seems like almost imposible, it does it online and offline, sometimes i can write like now, other times i can not write at all, what i do is go mad on the keyboard and well loadsa stuff happen, stuff you never knew the comp can do like cool formating and other stuff, anyway, i have no idea what it is and like i really want it to just go away. I though if i try upgrade to vista it may go away but apparently I cant cus my comp does not have enough ram. This has happened to me before, but then it was the speech recognition software, this time I have no idea, I have tried uninstalling all audio drives and software, reinstalling windows xp restoring it also, so, besides the obvious explenation of a ghoast being in my room :P what do you think is it, like what can I do and how may I get rid of narrator.

P.S, I aint a pro with computers like, just can find my way around it fine when theres no ghosts lurking haha. And sorry about the awful writing.
Second that. Picture of the year as far as I'm concerned. Simply unbelievable. What a time to be alive.

So, now that we can 'see' the 3D arrangement in a manner of speaking is there any way we could feed known protein structure in to neural networks by imaging them in quantity and take some of the sting out of protein folding by identifying likely candidate ways to do the folding ?

Or is that too big of a leap ?
61% Single!

Horrible. I'd recommend getting a life.
As a plantation owner might have complained, it's like saying, "My livelihood doesn't depend on slaves, so I'll feel free to 'free' yours." Admittedly, copyright is probably less harmful than slavery overall (and certainly is far less so on an individual level), but the analogy seems pretty good: slavery wasn't made illegal until it was already economically untenable, too.
You could have used a tool I wrote http://shellshadow.com

Then you could have watched them investigate the problem.
As a consulting programmer, I can imagine you might get paid $420/hr in a few rare cases:

1. You built something really complex and a very rich client needs emergency help with it.

2. You are extraordinarily famous and a very rich client feels they must have you.

3. You are convincingly misrepresenting yourself as a team of 7 hardworking people.

4. You have an unusually efficient way of doing something, so you can win fixed-cost-for-deliverables contracts and execute them in fewer hours.

As for what a mortal working as a consultant can normally achieve, $420/h is more than twice what I would consider a very good rate. Only under very unusual circumstances can I imagine a programmer billing at this rate, even on a large corporate client.

Well, maybe if you were working for a bank...
System administration wisdom
I encounter more and more examples of people with scary habits when it comes to administering systems, or to a lesser extent, any project.

Occasionally I can forgive someone for not knowing that tools exist to help them do a job (while it may be painful to watch them work inefficiently for awhile, I can fix that). But some habits are really hard to train them out of, and some make me wonder how the team functions at all.

I'll start with examples of course, and counter with what I consider to be acceptable. But I'm also interested in your own experiences. With any luck, this thread will become interesting to some, and educational to others. :)

[I've moved my list into a comment below.]

I'd be happy to see other mistakes people have seen, along with how you'd avoid the mistake, to educate the admins out there.
Great info provided in an authoritative, confidence-inspiring tone and level of detail... but if I wanted to read this from a source other than an pseudonymous thread commenter, what references do you recommend? (Is this from medical journals? Are you a practicing doctor or researcher in this field?)
You may have a stuck key or a fouled up contact layer... happened to me on an older keyboard as well, suddenly I'd get crazy input. A while later somebody fessed up to dropping their drink into my keyboard :(

Try another keyboard, see if it goes away.
Is this a new change? I don't feel like I've ever had a problem viewing someone's full profile, but maybe they define your network so broadly that if you have several hundred connections, it includes almost everyone?
They wrote about MongoDB for logging recently: http://blog.mongodb.org/post/172254834/mongodb-is-fantastic-... - capped collections sound ideal for short lived logs.

It would be interesting to write a command line script for piping Apache logs in to MongoDB, using Apache's "piped logs" feature: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/logs.html#piped
I'm using it for a new project. I hope it performs well for read-often, write-rarely apps as well.
I'd add not using a configuration management tool.
Hasn't LinkedIn always worked like this?

I can clearly still view the full profiles of everyone in my network, hapless.
Timelines: a visualization of time travel in popular culture
Am I the only one thinking that Rimuhosting is a rather unfortunate name?
Great analogy, but you missed the point. (Great analogy because I can still use it to demonstrate the point) I would be pretty pissed if my landlord use the master key to access my apartment when he had a valve in the utility closet to just shut-off all water to my apartment.

These are VPSes here. They can just pause the entire VPS instance, or further cap the CPU usage from what they had already capped it at.
What's that -- a long-winded way to say "tl;dr"? Look again, and see that "My livelihod does depend on copyright(able works)." While those aren't the specific words used to express the sentiment, that's definitely the sentiment explicitly expressed toward the end.
Something similar happened to us a few days ago on our RimuHosting VPS. A Python script was eating ~80% of the VPS CPU, so their tech guy, without asking us, tries to login as root to our box (WTF?). He fails, so he responds by rebooting our VPS, thus (?) causing some disk corruption, which he then tries to repair. Then, after-the-fact, he writes us a very confused email about the whole story.

Needless to say, we're moving away from RimuHosting. This is unacceptable.

An excerpt:

"I noticed your VPS was using a lot of CPU. I was not able to log in there, and on the console I saw lots of out-of-memory messages.

I restarted the VPS to make sure it was running in a sane state. I checked the console after a reboot and saw an error indicating some filesystem corruption. I stopepd it again and repaired that. Then replaced the /etc/inittab file which appeared to be corrupted. Now I see that has booted fine."
That's great.

Now . . . let's see if we can avoid legislating politeness.
It's not "breaking in". They own the server, and pretty much every host's terms of service allow them to do pretty much anything they deem necessary to maintain service for their other customers, or in response to abuse or law enforcement requests (read the terms of service at your favorite hosting provider; you'll find that you've agreed to this kind of intervention when you signed up).

So, this particular event shows a lack of good judgment on the part of the tech in question, and a lack of common courtesy in not notifying the customer of the issue in advance of taking action...but it is not an illicit act. No "break in" happened here. The options a hosting provider has when things are behaving badly are pretty much all things that a customer will not like. When a dedicated server is compromised and is being used to send spam, for example, the host will simply firewall the whole thing off from the world, shutting down all services. This happens all the time; the effected customer blames the host, sometimes. Sometimes there are other options. In this case, the host opted to turn off one (disputably) offending service rather than kill the whole host. I think we can all agree this wasn't the best way to handle it. Thus my assertion that this is a tech having a bad day (or simply one bad support tech at Rimuhosting, among mostly good ones).

Actually, I think the one thing I'm uncomfortable with is the illusion of propriety (ownership) Rimuhosting has given by saying "You are able to remove that if you are not comfortable with that.", in reference to the ssh key. This is a bit of a disconnect from the reality that under some circumstances, they will have to exert their ownership rights, and there's nothing you can do about it. At some point you just have to trust in the good faith of your provider. But the only alternative to doing what they did (assuming they, in good faith, thought Aaron's VM was damaging service for others), assuming they don't have the ability to throttle Xen instances on this particular machine (maybe it's too old to have that capability, I dunno, or maybe the tech in question didn't actually understand those capabilities; the tech could be new...everybody starts somewhere), would be to turn his VM off completely. From the techs perspective he may have thought he was doing Aaron a favor by leaving mail and other services running.

Again, I'm not arguing it was good judgment on the part of the tech. But to say that Rimuhosting broke into their own machine is ridiculous.
Two questions come into my mind after this article:

- Will we still use domain names in 25 years?
- How will addressing "things" look like in the future?

Your thoughts?
If the keyboard doesn't work, Google hijackthis and download it. When you run it, you can click on the items it finds in the report to learn more about what junk is in your trunk, and how to get rid of it....then you can hit up one of the online scanners to make sure your Antivirus didn't get compromised.
I searched in searchyc.com for pg blue as I remembered the comment that got down-voted. Also check this out : http://searchyc.com/user/pg?only=comments&sort=by_points... I didn't use this method earlier though.
Both. Ruby is hard to compile or interpret efficiently, but there's been plenty of research into ways of handling the same type of problems that Ruby has - look at Smalltalk and Self for example.

Ruby can be made a lot faster than current implementations, but the reasons it hasn't been made faster a long time ago is to a large extent down to the language design.

Now, how many of those decisions you could've made differently in order to get more performance without at the same time losing what makes Ruby so great to work with is another question...
Clearly we can't, since virtually everything that can be downloaded for free on the Internet is being downloaded for free on the Internet, books very much included.
I hate to be that guy, but...

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu
how would they know if it's useless if they didn't attend it in the first place? :P
my laptop isn't that old and it does not write just one leter on an on like ggggggggggggg, although it does do that, it, sometimes it just starts doing thing without touching it at all.
And what about pregnant mothers and others with adult acne?I see the attempt but do not agree with the execution.
It's unclear what the comparison chart means for "Expanded LinkedIn Network profile views". Could I see any more of my own connections' profiles than I already do?

(Can anyone with this service provide a comparative screenshot?)