skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a good suggestion I have to give the speech tomorrow but I think I need to do something like this to get better at it because it is such a valuable skill.
Is it just me, or is the only sample videos in the article which have good color contrast by default from the flip mino?
Quite right. Naked malevolence and self-destructiveness seem to me to be the two sides of Mr. Cipolla's stupidity coin. There are a host of bad emotional states that are characterized by naked malevolence and self-destruction.

To the extent that emotional forces are the primary mediators (as opposed to purely rational ones), I think that Cipolla's stupidity correlates well with the notion of "emotional intelligence" that people talk about nowadays.

I mostly refer to spite by its biblical handle "bitterness". I agree with you, that it's one of the most common and powerful emotional handicaps.
Whoever wrote the caption mixed up the Steves I guess.

Great story though, especially how the bishop 'owns' Steve Wozniak by buying time to do a little checking.
Thanks! The audience is 100+ so it will be the largest audience I have addressed. I think once it gets past a certain number it gets less intimidating, but only time will tell.
There was an article posted here a few weeks ago about a guy starting a rental site. He basically created a lot of mock listings for popular products, and when someone actually chose to rent it, he'd buy it and rent it out to the person. Then either return it or keep it for more people (Memory not serving me currently)

edit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804310
I'm not sure I see the incentive here. Follow my logic.
A prize is valuable because it's something you couldn't afford yourself. If I offered $1 prize people probably wouldn't be too psyched about it because a dollar is something they could spare out of their own pocket.

The whole point of this article is that NASA doesn't have enough money to overcome the hurdles you refer to. So it stands to reason that companies would have to spend more to overcome the hurdles than the prizes themself would be worth.

Which is why I don't see how prizes would have any positive impact.
I'd be willing to pay Github for some other premium service besides private repos (they're not of much use to me, tbh).

Uhh... can't think of anything off the top of my head that I really need or want though... OH, wait, I know, how about Bespin integration?
WTC Memorial: Rebranded
What usually gets overlooked is that Virgin Galactic is only initially for space tourism. The larger goal is intercontinental travel, to connect various spaceports together through sub-orbital flights.

It's not on wikipedia anywhere, I watched a TED interview with Richard Branson while on a Virgin America flight and the vision of hopping in and out of the atmosphere for travel has stuck with me ever since:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/richard_branson_s_life_at...
System-wide integration and being able to assume it's always present.

You're right in that, as far as I can tell, there are no new ideas in GCD. But it's integrated into the language, compiler, runtime system, kernel, and developers can assume that it is present on any Mac OS 10.6 and greater. That makes a big difference.

Further discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782399
Classic chicken egg problem inherent with sites that depend on users to generate the content.

Without existing content, users won't find it useful. Without users you can't get content.

In any case, don't fake it, duping your users is the worst thing you can do.
It's entirely possible that antioxidants make it less likely for you to get cancer but more likely to make cancer worse once you have it. Depending on how the two effects interact, the correlation could go either way.

Interesting random blog page describing research that shows a fruit- and vegetable-rich diet may actually be bad for you: http://donmatesz.blogspot.com/2009/08/phytochemical-fallacie...
I think the point was that you can't say "Oh! So-and-so wrote this section, because all of the code blocks are like:

if () {
}

instead of

if ()
{

}
"

Or "I know that so-and-so wrote this piece of code because there are goto's everywhere since he started off as a ASM programmer that eventually became a C programmer."

I've maintained a codebase that started in '89, and I'll tell you that there were some messy things in the code and lots of it was unmaintainable (well, 'maintenance' requires either 'major rewrite' or 'dirty dirty dirty hack'). I could go into code and see 3-4 different ways of accessing the database used within the same program. This is the kind of stuff that I'm assuming he's talking about. I've seen code where there are 'layers' like some sort of core-sample that allow you to tell when/who modified the code and what 'era' it was modified in.
In my limited experience with Amtrak (admittedly limited to the Capitol Corridor line to Sacramento), there's no real problem with the comfort and quietness of the train -- the seats are comfortable, the trains aren't crowded, the staff are reasonably pleasant, and it's no slower than driving. I've never noticed the noise as a problem either. Combine all that with the pleasant view of the Bay on the Richmond-Martinez stretch and it's a really pleasant way to travel.

The only problems are (a) that they're often late, and (b) that even with the bridge toll and $4 gas it's cheaper to drive my own gas-hogging car to Sac than to catch the train.
Do you mean process migration (rescheduling a process/thread on a different core, which does bad things to caches) instead of context switching (switching between different processes/threads on the same core, which requires saving registers to memory and does bad things to caches)? If so, any decent modern scheduler tries to avoid migrating threads.
Don't exaggerate; it's not "three times as much."

Amtrak NEC Service, New Haven (NHV) to Washington Union Station (WAS):

Train 175, Northeast Regional, 5'46", $139

Train 2173, Acela Express, 4'36", $213

So for $74 extra you get there roughly an hour and ten minutes faster, provided they both run on-time. (In my experience the Acelas tend to run on-time more often than the regionals, although they both run late more frequently than they should.) The Acela is also a business-class seat while the Regional is coach, and the Acela train is nicer overall.

Whether it's worth the extra money for the extra hour is a personal decision, of course, but I don't think the pricing is wholly inappropriate. It would be great if the Acela was faster because that would make the value equation that much better, but it's not a terrible ripoff as-is.

EDIT: These are fares for today, the equivalent of a "Yankee-class" ticket on an airline. You could do better by buying with a 3-day advance, but I think the Acela/Regional delta would be about the same, percent-wise.
The commenter I replied to had said: "Being from India (where the rail system is awesome, even though its not high speed [...]", so we were talking non-high-speed for the purposes of this comparison of how he prefers rail to driving, and I prefer driving to rail. However, you're certainly under no obligation to care. :)

The distances are much shorter in India. Moreover, most of the trains have bunks you can sleep on and are overnight trains. If you buy second class ticket between big metros, you are even served dinner and breakfast and all just for $30. Now you can chose between driving and riding a train.
It's even better if no one else can figure out their mess. Then the government has to hire them back in to fix it!
My experience (other chapters may differ):

1. Everyone who comes speaks to the entire group for 1 or 2 minutes. This was called "Table Topics". A different member is assigned each week to administer the Table Topics. I remember one time the Table Topics person handed each one of us a paper bag that we had to open, remove the object inside, and give an interesting talk. My object was a clothes pin.

2. Everyone gets a mentor when they join to help them through the education.

3. Everyone cycles through the program at their own pace giving longer and longer prepared talks. 5:00, 10:00, 15:00, etc. You give one of these every month or so.

4. Every single talk is publicly critiqued by at least one judge. They are usually ruthless and very, very helpful. It took me months to stop playing with my hands when I talked. They finally got me to stop.

5. I remembered speaking about my business in all my prepared talks. I can't imagine having a better place to practice than Toastmasters.
Well I can't comment on the quality of the calculations he's talking about - but even the previous estimates of the power consumption of the brain were awe inspiring. The power consumption and stability against things like epilepsy are an important clue to how the thing works.
I think indifference factors in a lot as well. A lot of times people aren't actively wishing harm on others, but by the same token they won't change there own behavior to mediate harm that may be done to others because of their actions.
Well, they also don't provide (good or reasonable) customer service for their cash cow products like AdSense and AdWords, so what does that tell you?
The press can really suck. There are really good reporters and there are terrible ones. Some will go out of their way to get you to say what they want you to say even if it takes cutting your words completely out of context.

I'm completely out of the spotlight and happy about that, but there was a time when that was not the case. My policy was very simple.

You can print it after I sign off on it otherwise no deal.

Cost me a couple of interviews but on the whole it paid off in that I got some control over the process. Some of these things are misunderstandings, especially when matters are technical, but there are also examples of more deliberate misrepresentations.

Be careful.
I guess the key is to simply recognize that he's using the terms "intelligent", "helpless", "bandit", and "stupid" in a formalized manner that does not strictly match the correct understandings of those words we have when discussing other subjects.

FTFY

I hate it when people give new meanings to words that already have perfectly good and useful meanings. If you have new concept that requires a name, make up a new word. Don't take an old word and give it an analogous meaning. Doing so confuses language and creates an opportunity for equivocation. That is, when people start using conclusions based on the new meanings and applying them to condition based on the old meanings.

Needlessly confusing language is stupid, in both senses of the term.
Come on, its not fair to say something for nothing. As much as you can't belittle the importance of infrastructure, you also can't act as if its the only thing that matters. GitHub obviously has a product outside the raw hosting they provide, and each additional user brings on extra work on their end.

For all we know it could have been equally lopsided in the other direction: if EngineYard was sending them tons of traffic through free accounts, it could have proved costly in terms of support and negative effect on paying customers.

We of course don't know.
Ah, that is a good point. I hadn't thought of that. It should be possible to test for that with present data though, so you would think that somebody would have uncovered it before now since antioxidants are apparently given to cancer patients as a form of treatment. If it increased mortality rates in cancer patients looking at the data should be able to uncover that.
When I said context switching I meant context switching. Now that you mention it, GCD may also reduce thread migrations. I'm just speculating since we don't know how GCD works.
http://code.google.com/p/plblocks/ is probably the place to start.
Practice, practice, practice. Record yourself practicing and watch it later.
This is exactly why there is a lot of opposition to high speed rail in the US. It primarily helps those who live inside major cities. When constituents feel like they are paying for something that they are not benefiting from they will oppose it.
Germany and Japan are tiny, though. Hell, Japan is virtually one-dimensional, which makes it a great place for building rail lines.
The usual advice is to imagine the audience naked.

Don't.
Ok, as far as I can tell, the real story is that Engine Yard relies on a GFS/SAN setup that doesn't scale in the unique way that Github needs.

If you think about it, Github is one of the few sites that actually directly uses the filesystem heavily. Everyone else hits scaling issues on the DB first.

The sad thing of all of this is it's not really a matter
of scaling, and it never has been. Our bottleneck has
always been the file system. GFS just... sucks. I'm sorry,
but I have to say it. Case in point, your graph. The first
rebuild I ran timed out because of GFS. The second one ran
fine, took maybe a minute to process, if that. GFS impacts
everything... gem build failures due to cloning... GFS.
Network graphs taking long time to build... GFS. Caching
jobs not completing... GFS. I think you see where I'm
going here. There's no plans to deploy the new code to the
live servers, and I think the reason is that we're afraid
it'll make GFS performance worse, not better. But on the
new servers where we don't have to fight GFS, it's
amazing.
Do you know if RackSpace will be giving GitHub free infrastructure? If they're not then do you expect them to fail?

FWIW, I first heard about Engine Yard through GitHub, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Wow! That's pretty impressive. Make sure you sleep well the night before, that's crucial.

It makes you more relaxed, less hyper.
Funny thing is that I remember complaining about exactly this 20 years ago!!
I wanted smaller meals at lower prices. My friend pointed out to me that the reason restaurants were raising portion sizes was to price at what the market will bear. Most people feel they get their money's worth with the huge amounts of food, so there is really no incentive for the restaurant to offer a lower-priced option. So for those of us who don't feel the need to stuff ourselves, the option is to take the rest home if possible.
It's also inaccurate: GitHub doesn't offer the largest free storage quota. That's still Google Code, which offers 1024 mb/project, rather than 300 mb/user.
I can't be 100% sure, but here's why I believe he was had. 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.

There's also a saying, "He who says the most in an argument is in the wrong." electromagnetic spoke a lot to "cover his trail." I believe he was hopeful that the hoax was not a hoax. I was had too, I thought, wow, that's clever, if it's true the world will change. I was hopeful.

It's okay to be wrong.

I suppose you could say I believe he was had as well, because of intuition. Intuition is knowing something without knowing how you know it. I don't believe he would have spent so much time supporting the idea if he thought it was a hoax. He even back-peddled a little bit by saying "What I said was true even if this isn't true."

If he believed it was a hoax, why not say, "This is probably a hoax, but here's the science..."
I don't really agree with his first point at all. Is there any data to prove that 'real world' names are better? If this was true then why don't more real world companies use real world names instead of names like "Alltel", "Hertz" or "Ruby Tuesdays"?
Why do event sites suck?
Excellent article, all of the points I'd agree with. A couple more points and he'd almost have a ten commandments style guide to developing something worthwhile for the Internet.
I use the Skype plugin for Pidgin. If new Skype won't make it work, I won't upgrade ever.
Hacking the hacker: How a consultant shut down a malicious user
two notes from that blog posting:

> Plants have no claws or teeth, nor can they run from predators, so they have chemical defenses instead.

some do, sure. but plenty of plants rely on animals to disperse their seeds, and making it dangerous to eat them is an evolutionary mistake. fruits taste good because they want you to eat them, process their seeds, and 'deposit' them elsewhere in the world.

>After 7.3 years of follow-up care, the two groups had almost identical invasive cancer incidence, 16.7% in the intervention group, and 16.9% in the control group. Increasing intake of produce appeared to have no effect on cancer recurrence despite changes in blood levels of antioxidants.

and this couldn't have anything to do with anything else? environment? lifestyle? genetics? affluence? etc.? there's more than one way to get cancer, diet alone will not save you.
The Deep Blue analogy is strained, now that Rybka 3 on a notebook computer will easily trounce the best human player in the world.
Yes, that's a word I was looking for but couldn't come up with.
http://giantrobotlasers.com/post/176847959/bill-hickss-princ...
JRubyConf to be held the day after RubyConf2009
> We identified the bottlenecks and supported GitHub and the community by making patches to ssh to allow key lookup in MySQL rather than a text file. That remains, to this day, one of the finest examples of Engine Yard support and it makes me extremely proud just thinking of it.

This seems... odd to me. It doesn't feel like the right boundary between businesses. From a hosting provider, I expect good, steady service, reboots, a root console, and that they'll fix anything that's on their end (hardware, for instance).

Patching ssh is development work, and is something I would expect to pay for to meet specific goals, but not something that comes as part of my hosting package. I mean, what if you are just cruising along, and don't need any deep hacking over a couple of months. Is your money being wasted? With actual developers, I could redeploy them to do other things. Can I do that with EY?

They seem like really good, sharp guys, but I don't quite get the business, I guess.
I’m always impressed with folks that take time to compute such a knowledge base list. Kudos!
Funny thing is that we told github that gfs would not scale for them over a year ago, we also outlined how to move to a shared nothing chunk server architecture. They didn't take our advice so it's mostly their own architecture decisions that were holding them back with regards to gfs.

Anyway there seems to be plenty of airchair quarterback on this one. The real story is that we can't afford to host them for free anymore.
After a little more Googling around, it looks like there are some studies showing increased cancer rates when people are given antioxidants: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/prevention/anti...

(And some going the other way, too.)
That's true.

However, by far the most common explanation for "I started eating less, counting calories, and I gained weight" is not a tremendous increase in metabolic efficiency, but a combination of:

1) spontaneous fidgeting and unscheduled exercise dropping off (sitting in your chair all day without getting your normal couple trips to the water cooler/bathroom, not shopping today because you're tired) - this is called "NEAT" if you want to Google

2) self-delusion as to the degree of reduced food intake

The latter is the most likely cause of severely failing diets.
Same venue, and it's free.
Real hardware and lots of it. Once we get moved over and everything's humming along nicely, we'll do a writeup or two about the new infrastructure.
What FS will you use? SSDs?
Depending on the subject matter of the site, you could invite users to a private beta, and once you have enough people signed up, they could start filling up the site with content behind closed doors. Then when you open, you have enough content to keep the masses happy.
Which link didn't work? I definitely want to fix it.

And thanks. I'm definitely serious about building something that will last.
A lot of people ignore common sense for platitudes. Sensationalist pro-greenwash caterwauling is just another trend among many that persists across generations, since before our modern era of lulz-inducing post-pamphleteers (Wells, Chesterton, etc.)

HN isn't special, and it attracts all kinds. QED.
Ask HN: Help me find a source?
Hi,

I'm working on a book, and trying to find the source for something. I'm hoping you might help.

A few months ago, my business partner stumbled upon an article here that talked about the efficiencies found in better programmers.

I'm paraphrasing badly here, but I believe the general point was that a better programmer would write code that was ultimately 8 times more effective than others. This was measured in the brevity of code, etc.

If you can help me find this link, I'd certainly appreciate the help!

Cheers,

Eric
The South does have large population centers, it's just that they're rather far apart. The northeast, maybe extending into Chicago, is the one and only part of the US where a high-speed rail network would make sense, but it's silly to expect a government to do things just because they make sense.
I did have to quickly go through a metal detector (IIRC) to get on a train in Spain. But it was nothing like airport security.

This is a politics article though (hint: whitehouse). It should not be here.
BA/BS CS/Math/Engineering

I guess I'm not qualified for this job, even though I can out-code most of the CS majors I've worked with.
By offering a prize, a large organization can "pay ahead" the cost of developing, testing, and implementing a new technology.

Look at it this way: let's assume it would cost the government $20 Billion to reduce cost-to-orbit by three-fold, say through the use of hybrid-magnetic launchers or some such. But that $20 Billion would take 20 years and dozens of missions.

Instead the agency could offer a $10 Billion prize for any company that had three successive launches at one-third the cost in the next three years. Each year after that the prize would increase by $1 Billion.

Now, instead of one technology, pursued by one agency, you have a dozen possible solutions pursued by a dozen organizations. At some point the prize money is paid out -- arguably much earlier than 20 years but who knows? It's definitely not going to cost any more money, and now you've decreased cost-to-orbit of every other mission you ever want to have. That means for every mission you have after the goal is reached, you've reduced launch costs by two-thirds.

Forever.

In addition, you're likely to end up with 3 or 4 technologies that all can reduce cost-to-orbit, all that are viable.

That's why reducing cost-to-orbit is such a critical goal. It's this huge productivity multiplier. Yes, you spend more now, but it makes all the other decisions easier (eventually). You quickly reach a point where lots of entities have the funds to do multiple missions using lots of new technologies -- a much better situation than continuing to pay more and more money for less and less return.
I don't think that's totally fair to say, we've put a considerable amount of effort into GitHub over here at EY, across all of our departments. GitHub offers a great product and it's really amazing to see them grow so fast, but that success also introduces a whole lot of new problems to the situation, many of which can be quite costly to solve.

It's just a conclusion that makes the most sense for both sides of the arrangement.
some do, sure. but plenty of plants rely on animals to disperse their seeds...

Yes, and that's noted in the article, a few paragraphs later:

Some hunter-gatherer tribes do eat substantial amounts of fruits and vegetables (wild types, which have even higher concentrations of poisons), yet remain free of cancer and heart disease. Significantly, hunter-gatherers tend to consume more fruits than vegetables. Fruits have lower toxin levels and enable a plant to work symbiotically with animals/predators to increase reproductive success.