skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that people are blind to contemporary stupidity and self-congratulatory about past stupidity they have overcome. People love visiting museums that make them appreciate how far we've come in overcoming racism, genocide, and medieval torture (well, scratch that last one, we have to fight the War on Terruh after all).

Nonetheless, I think the Turing spectacle is valuable because public shows of support will influence fence-sitters to emulate us in support of awesome gay people.
Make it useful for people to join even when no one else is there. If it's a dating site, offer them fun stuff like personality tests and what not that they can do only if they sign up / create a profile. You get the idea.
Thank you noodle, byoung2, skushch, joshuarr and intregus for testing and giving me the advice. I will make those changes, add the features and try to launch again by next weekend.

byoung2: No idea how I'm going to make money. This was a test to see if I could make a useful product. For now consider it a free image host to use if you'd like to and keep an eye out for the recommended changes.

THANK YOU ALL!
I haven't been on the Capitol Corridor line and don't know if they use newer, nicer trains than most of Amtrak.

I've been on all of the cross country lines and a number of the stretches in the east, which almost exclusively use Superliner cars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superliner_(railcar) and similar single-level coach cars. The difference between these and modern trains is like night and day. The Superliners are noisy and bumpy, with the classic "ka-clump, ka-clump" throughout the journey, and the interiors are cramped and, frequently, colored a drab, stained brown. In contrast, modern trains feel like they are gliding on the tracks with almost no sound (no "ka-clump") and tend to be roomy and comfortable.

Indeed, Amtrak's service is horrible, too. The worst case I experienced was paying for a sleeper car for an overnight trip, only to be told as we were being herded onto a single level coach that the sleeper car was broken and we were being downgraded.
Be sure you know what your goal is.

For a best-man toast, maybe it's to make people laugh, foster warm feelings towards the groom/couple, keep the party moving, whatever.

For other speeches, it might be sales, or passing on information, or political persuasion.

But know what it is you want to accomplish and plan the length, topic, style, etc. around that.
What Any Startup or VC Can Learn from 12Seconds.tv
Any new startup can watch and learn from the 12seconds.tv struggles. Focus on generating high-quality content in the first three phases of your life cycle. Integrate with third-party channels and applications only when there’s a high percentage of relevant, high-quality content being generated on the channel.
A few tips:

* No caffeine - it makes you more jumpy, more anxious.

* No heroin - talk too slow

* Practice 10-20 times going through the whole thing

* Practice doing the first paragraph 50-100 times - nothing derails a speech more than a stumble at the beginning.

* Practice acting comfortable - don't just read/deliver

* Alcohol - you need to be prepared here. Some people are more fluid (ahem...) with a drink while it messes other people up. Decide prior to attending the wedding what your plan is

* Flirt with the pretty girls with your eyes. I find that I can maintain that "randomness" factor of scanning and including the whole audience if I look for the hotties and then make eye contact. It also makes me more comfortable looking at pretty girls than men or women twice my age.

* Look your best - confidence comes from looking good and feeling good. The "looking good" should be easy - you're in a suit - and the "feeling good" should come from the fact that you are prepared due to all of your practice.

Good luck!
There's a rewrite of jsMath on the way called MathJax which will provide even better rendering of math on the web.

http://www.mathjax.com/
How to write a Snow Leopard service that toggles hidden files.
I think you'll find this covered (with citations) in Peopleware, and possibly the Mythical Man Month too.
Boring, same-old tear down. Lots of people are making good livings online with content businesses, but nobody wants to write about that.

Probably because the people who are making money at it want to charge money to tell you how they make money at it.

For the record, I have a domain name addiction and I register three or four really damn good ones a month. Not all the good names are "taken." There is not a finite pool of good names that can be depleted -- they are as infinite as human ingenuity.

And... I made $22k off my first (and currently, only) infoproduct -- $20k of that while it was in beta and with almost no promotion - with, in fact, zero traditional advertising (e.g. we didn't pay a penny.)

I'm tired of all the people who'd prefer to sit and whine, listing all the reasons online business is not as easy as buying a domain and GoDaddy SiteTonite™, instead of actually doing something.
All I ever dialed from my Commodore 64 (the SID chip generated bluebox tones) in 1993 was the They Might Be Giants band dial-a-song, which played a new tune every day. (718 397 6962).

Also, Captain Crunch (John Draper) made a $1 million in about 1982 from selling Easy Writer, a word processor, to some big company. Something I've been trying to do for ages!
I think a lot of the responses to this are really unfair. First, this isn't something that is possibly detrimental to the company (Facebook) so printing it without hearing their "side of the story" is extremely low risk. Second, they're reporting something factual. Ignore the fact that there was a bit of a trick in who saw the feature. There was a button on the site, this wasn't an unconfirmed rumor or anything like that.

TechCrunch asked for more information on the featured, they didn't get it, and they wrote a story based on what they had observed themselves.

The idea that they in some way were being sleazy or should have waited longer to be fair to Facebook is just silly. If this was a material issue that Facebook wanted to comment on, they would have. This happened during normal business hours, not in the middle of the night on a weekend. Facebook PR is a well run machine.

For a bit of context, I run our PR/marketing at Justin.tv and when I get requests like this the first thing I do is call the reporter, usually within a minute. That is my job and the nature of reporting is that timeliness is incredibly valuable. If I ignored that and didn't respond as fast as possible I wouldn't be doing my job.
I assume this is the same as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=817975
I assume this is the same as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=817813
Actually, that's the correct advice for any skill: "there's no substitute for actually doing it." Practice makes perfect. It's not just a cliche.
> Train 2173, Acela Express, 4'36", $213

Dude, it is still crap expensive. In my country you pay $210 for a 2000km plane ticket return (4000km total). That is just crazy.

In China trains are dirt cheap, on-time, clean and fast (at least the ones I took). Why does that train of yours have to be that expensive?
Microsoft would never support GCD. They will invent something similar completely incompatible that makes it difficult to port programs to any other platform.
It is really sad to see Skype, which is incredibly popular, still doesn't know how to leverage its platform. I hope they learn that to build and leverage a product successfully, you absolutely need to help developers make money off your product. If developers don't feel invited, neither will end users in the long run (well, they will have the user base until the next Skype killer comes along).
Talk much more slowly than you think is reasonable.

It will seem slow to you, but it will sound normal to the audience.
I think the largest crowd I've presented to was a little over 500 or so people. I would not have guessed that from my view from the stage; seemed much smaller.

But something to keep in mind is that even if you can't see people you need to occasionally direct your attention to those in the back or up in the balcony so they don't feel ignored and tune out.

Also, assume that the audience is on your side and want to like you.
Teenage = 13-19 (ends with -teen).
How is this different from clicking on the PDF link above (and not the auto-inserted, value-free scribd link) ??
Hi HN, Are we the anti-eBay?
My friend and I are tackling group-buying on the web. Sign up to be notified when we launch.
Maybe the developers building apps that run on EY aren't the best developers to be patching ssh? Is your money wasted if you hire a lawyer on retainer and don't ask enough questions?
I thought Java's sorting algorithm was just recently replaced:
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6804124

Is this the same, or something new?
For a goodly chunk of the USA, driving is the only way to get around. Roadways are a lot cheaper option for a lot of areas.
There are two very unreasonable sides to this issue:

One is, as in this article:

> Be nice. There's nothing the obese can do; you're not superior to them in any way other than fortunate genetics.

The other (and more common):

> Low body fat (with optional huge muscles for men) is and should be valued by all, so my modest efforts at staying lean are just too heroic for those weak-willed fatties.

The truth is that the majority of obese Americans could of their own initiative (without fat camp, medication, surgery, involuntary famine) become not-obese. Regardless of a "heritability" statistic shows (it's probably not what you think), people can significantly influence their weight and body fat in a way they never can for height.

The other truth is that it's incredibly more easy for some people to become lean (or muscular) than others; I'd say almost to the same extent as people vary in native intellectual or musical talent.

So, the main point: "be nice; don't assume superiority of moral fiber based on superior physique" is absolutely valid and needs widespread appreciation by smug bastards everywhere.
I think this could be turned into a startup. thoughts?
Practice. Write your whole talk out, print it out somewhat large, tape it to the wall in multiple sheets, and rehearse to the wall, marking up the parts that don't work. Repeat until you can get through it without changing it on paper again.

You won't use the written version when you actually give the talk, but you will be 10x more confident.
Probably not the exact article you were looking for, but still a good read: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/programming-and-developmen...
Hard to tell from just the splash page...
That's a tricky thing to protect against. You'd almost have to fetch all pages and do a content comparison a la google news to see what goes together.

This sort of mixup happens all the time.

And sometimes that's even good, when an interesting subject scrolls off the newpage before it receives any votes. Then a few days later someone will post the same news from a different source and suddenly it makes the homepage.
indeed he does. but, at the end of a large "eating a lot of plants is bad for you" essay, to tack on the short note "oh wait, fruits? maybe those aren't bad for you" type of statement undercuts the credibility of the entire argument for me.
It is more convenient; there is no need to download the PDF and it can be viewed directly in the browser.
What I got from that blog post was 'there are lots of bad things in fruits and vegetables along with the good things'. Isn't that the truth for anything? Unless we start making foods that are homogeneous mixtures, every natural food that we eat will have good and bad things in it.

I somehow don't think that the solution is to have a diet that's heavy in meats and carbohydrates. I think that it would be interesting to take a look at cancer rates in Ireland (pre-potato famine). Most of the farmers/serfs there had a diet of mostly potatoes as I understand it. Did they have higher or lower cancer rates?
author's definition of stupid people has nothing to do with stupidity and I find using the word stupid highly misleading.
Noise, even at the level of 10%, in actual calorie content of food compared to nutritional labels, is irrelevant (there are other, more significant sources of variance in your own metabolism and activity in any case).

If, over the course of a week, you haven't lost any weight, decrease your target calorie count by 50. Eventually the odds of predicted vs. actual noise giving you an "over maintenance" intake for a given week fall to epsilon.

Counting calories is not even necessary.
good question. you tell us.
I never thought of the High Speed Rail as a commuter exclusive option. While that may be the intent, looking at the routes that have been brought up so far I was under the impression that this was intended as a general attempt to make the US more interconnected.

That said, most of the routes are not places that are terribly feasible to commute back and forth to by car. Just eyeballing the routes, most of them look to be in the 3-4 hour highway driving time. Like its been mentioned elsewhere, if they can do highway travel times, that becomes a feasible replacement for the short commuter flights. If they can run at a reasonably high speed, rather than having to slow down all the time (like the existing high speed rail in the US, which rarely reaches highway speed) it may become reasonable as a daily commute.

There are several people I work with (in Tampa, not a huge metro area at all, but with no real public transportation) who have close to hour long driving commutes. If you can do that and live ~100 miles away on the high speed rail, that would greatly increase the reasonable mobility for commuting.
Hey all. Wanted to chime in the discussion.

My blog post is direct and to the point. There's honestly no mystery about this, I laid out all the details, possibly excepting one.

We designed our infrastructure offering 3 years ago. We knew that the vast majority of websites would produce nearly read-only file I/O. GFS's less than stellar write performance isn't a problem in that typical case.

Along comes Github, and they have an entirely different disk I/O profile to the rest of our customers. Github was built on a shared-something architecture because GFS made it quick and easy to get up and running, developing features, and attracting users. This is a good thing!

Github has been very vocal about their dislike of the GFS filesystem we use for shared filesystem access. GFS doesn't scale forever, and we've never suggested it does. It could scale far larger than it has at Github, but fizx hit the nail on the head: we weren't willing to do it for free, and Github was unwilling to pay our price.

We warned Github many, many moons ago that given their growth rate, in order to scale their application smoothly and inexpensively, a shared-nothing architecture was eventually going to be needed. We offered to help them with that architecture, as we saw Github running wonderfully atop a cloud service such as EC2.

Rather than do the re-architecture now, they've chosen instead to move to a vendor who can provide them a high performance, high availability, non-commodity, proprietary network file server infrastructure. I suspect it will work well for them, and we'll all enjoy a faster Github. :-)

From my perspective, I really want everyone to understand that there's no bad blood on the EY side, and hopefully none on the Github side. Business is business, decisions need to be made each and every day.
I think it's definitely a good idea...the hurdle you would face is getting the data. Maybe the existing event sites thought of spidering data but were unsuccessful. How would you do it differently?
This is a very commonly expressed idea. One of the most-cited sources is "Mythical Man Month" by Fred Brooks.

For more:
http://www.google.com/search?q=10x+programmer
A rule I have learned from improvisational comedy: everything you do in front of a crowd is right. Don't apologize, just smile and continue, because everything you do is right.
You appear to be vaporware to me.

Also, you appear to think @@@.@ is a valid email address, not to mention the empty string. Makes me wonder if you think SQL injection is a valid email address too.
Let me give you a money-saving tip:

If they call themselves "ethical hackers", they're charging 70% too much per hour.
EY publicizes their Ruby expertise, not their 'hack on security-critical crypto code' expertise, and while it's impressive, and to their credit that they were able to do it, it still leaves me thinking that a fixed monthly fee is the wrong way to pay for that kind of talent.

> if you hire a lawyer on retainer and don't ask enough questions?

At a certain point, yes.
I found this very helpful: http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/html/icb.topic58703/winston1.ht...
Twitter's new terms of service: Give us all rights to your words
Nice, I'm really looking forward that to that. I'd love to hear about the transition too - big moves aren't easy, as I'm sure you guys know.
From our perspective, it was a matter of helping our partner and the Ruby community succeed.

We're working really hard to make Ruby on Rails succeed. This is just one of the many ways that we've pitched in to help it do so.

If, during that downtime, when the "Twitter's problems are Ruby on Rails" FUD was running high, would anyone believe that a Github scale failure wasn't a Ruby on Rails problem? We weren't willing to test it, so we solved the problem, i.e. we put our money where our mouth is -- That Ruby on Rails scales just fine, the bottlenecks are generally elsewhere.
The main problem with high speed rail in California is that LA isn't really a city, it's just a vast populated basin. You might get dropped at a station called "Los Angeles", but you're probably still an hour's drive from whatever part of Los Angeles you want to be in. Once you've gone through the hassle of renting a car at the station and driving to where you want to be, you might as well have driven all the way from San Francisco.
I am shocked, SHOCKED I say, that nobody has brought up FapWS3 -> http://github.com/william-os4y/fapws3 , which runs about twice as fast for a "hello world" bench as Tornado, and wraps libevent for the async socket handling. As an added bonus, fapws3 can handle wsgi apps, django, etc...
That may be what neilk meant, I can't say. It's not what I meant. Even given the same style guide, you could probably tell the difference between my code and someone else's because I tend to write shorter functions, longer function names, and I use temporaries aggressively, especially to avoid linebreaks at inconvenient spots. I also write a lot of one or two-line block comments.
New web architecture inspired by particle physics
I'm using Konqueror on KDE on SuSE and it comes up fine in the browser directly. Your link appears to me to add an extra layer. Maybe I'm missing something.

Not important, just confused. Situation normal ...
I was thinking about this. I'm not sure how the other sites did it, but I would try to write an algorithm that classifies whether a page has an event or not. If there is an event, then parse it and check for duplicates. I have some other ideas for easily allowing users to add events.
Samsung F250 Green Unlocked
Samsung F250 is individual and the greatest with gigantic appearance incorporated handset on Samsung. This is a little wireless movable broadcast that offers you an amount of extraordinary skin texture. 1.3 megapixel camera to let you click.
The only two things on that list that aren't absolutely necessary for Twitter to even operate their site are adapt and modify, and if they ever want to show your tweets as excerpts (which seems reasonable enough to me), those are necessary. You are implicitally granting the right to "use, copy, reproduce, process, ...publish, transmit, display and distribute" your words every you post a comment to any site you don't own. Otherwise, they would not be legally allowed to even store your comment on their servers, much less show it to others.
Maybe those open source projects should charge a fee as well?
Rather than do the re-architecture now, they've chosen instead to move to a vendor who can provide them a high performance, high availability, non-commodity, proprietary network file server infrastructure. I suspect it will work well for them, and we'll all enjoy a faster Github. :-)

GitHub has been working on a re-architecture since our last major feature release, which was GitHub Issues in April.

And we can't wait to roll it out.
I agree that's it's not necessarily avoidable, and it's not necessary to avoid. I do think, however, that it's useful to cross-reference the items so people can read all the relevant comments.

Not everyone agrees, I occasionally get down-mud, and I'm not as anal about it as I once was. Waba Sabi, and all that.
There's The Hidden Tracker too:
http://z6gw6skubmo2pj43.tor2web.com/
Eight hard truths about online media
Great news, Chris, sorry to misrepresent.

So, the new Github architecture is shared nothing?
Jesus Christ, there's a lot of drama-mongering in this thread. Grow the fuck up, it's a business decision that both sides had an interest in seeing happen.
I think this is one of Eric Ries' better posts this year: he is outlining a risk startups face AFTER some early success, when your guard is down and you are more inclined to believe that you know what you are doing--and as a result you do not believe that you need to be as diligent at framing your hypotheses and how you plan to verify them.

I think LinkedIn is violating this rule now, making a number of unilateral changes to group functionality that have deleted features and made the entire concept much less useful. They are not interested in a conversation at all, the decision has been made and they have and moved on.
> First, this community is one in which he would be rewarded more for outing a hoax than he would get from some internal desire to "have fun at others expense." That kind of thing doesn't go over well here.

I think that is exactly what makes it more rather than less likely that he's telling the truth. It's an honest admission that could get him some flak.

After all, why admit to this now if it wasn't the truth.

With a moniker like electromagnetic and a fair amount of accurate knowledge at his disposal he threw off enough 'good stuff' to confuse the hell out of me. I had to go to some trouble to get the "'wtf', this guy seems to know what he's talking about, so how come he defends it?" feeling out of my system.

I actually suspected that he was doing it on purpose but I wasn't brave enough to call him out on it. And I don't feel bad for admitting that, I really think that it was a pretty good prank.

When he said 'it is true, even it if isn't true' that is exactly what it is. The basic principle is sound, this implementation is absolutely not.

FWIW, I've been a member of fieldlines for many years and one of our pet activities there is to debunk bullshit renewable energy schemes.

Another thing that threw me off was that they claimed to be using some kind of solvent, but then when I got to the bit where it worked indoors I realized it must certainly be a hoax, or at least a gross misunderstanding of electro-chemical processes. The 'has to be moist' was a pretty bad sign that something else was going on here, the metals another (hair being a pretty much perfect insulator).

So, after all that the only questions remaining are:

How do they do it ?

No way those fluorescent lamps are staying lit without some additional source of energy spliced in there somehow.

Are they themselves still deluded by their invention ? (hard to imagine, given the above)

Are they aware of the basic flaws and are they keeping up a pretense hoping the media attention will die off (that usually doesn't take very long), or are they in too deep now ?

And congratulations to electromagnetic on a pretty good prank, to quote GWB, fool me once ... ;)
Ask A Pizza: What's it like being the crunch food of choice for game developers?