skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Sitting in a train is not stress-free, for one thing.

It's the closest I've ever known to stress-free transportation unless you include limousines.

> here are all these people around you, who you can't just ignore completely

Why can't you? You can't fart in public cause that's bad education, but take a book or a laptop, a PMP and a pair of earbuds and you're off. You can also sleep, many do here in the early trains.

> It's like being at a party where you know no one, and parties are hard enough to deal with even if you know everyone at them.

Uh no it's not, at a party you're supposed to talk to people and socialize. In a train you're supposed to do your own stuff and not bother other travelers.

> if there were enough room for a decent-sized laptop between you and the seat in front

There is. In France there are even the center/4 places tables with even more room. And that's 2nd class.

> you'd still have to put everything away

Put what away? Lift your laptop using one hand and get out.

> whenever the people away from the aisle wanted out

In France's TGV, there's one window seat and one aisle seat. Period. And if you use reservations and are early enough you can pick your seat. I pretty much always get window seat on the upper deck.

> Also, when you're driving, there's always the possibility of stopping at something that interests you, or taking a different route.

You're in a train to go from point A to point B, not to visit Manitoulin Island. And the different route complaint is nonsensical.

> and while you might choose to put yourself in a traveling jail for 12 hours

There is no planned US route even remotely reaching 12h. In a current-generation HST, 12h would be more than 2000 miles in a single trip. That's simply not part of the operational range.

> I took a train when I moved from Alabama to the DC metro area last year

Care = none. We're talking high-speed rail here, not 60 years old trainsets on shit lines.

> and Amtrak, the train I took, is subsidized

So are airports and highways.
Can't get OpenID to work Does anyone have this working?
> It sounds odd Engine Yard hosts an entire for-profit company for free just in exchange for some complimentary accounts.

why? its fairly high quality, targeted advertising with a built-in demonstration.
Antioxidants and Cancer: Have we got it Backwards?
A really comprehensive list of cheat sheets and tutorials: The Web Developer's Field Guide:
http://360voltage.com/wdfg/
Working conditions can be very different. Sometimes you can get some sort of business class, where pretty much everything is geared toward laptop use: power outlets, wireless, seating, tables and so on. But even without it, I prefer by far to read a book then to drive. The "awkwardness" factor is something you can get used to pretty fast.
I think you and Cipolla are using these terms differently. He uses "intelligent" and "bandit" (and "stupid" and "helpless", as well) to refer to patterns of behavior, while you are using them to refer to the basic character of the individual. Consider, for instance, the fact that you say you have no trouble causing harm to bandits. Part of the reason for this is almost certainly an intelligent (in Cipolla's usage) lack of concern for the well-being of those who harm others, so long as you profit, because hurting them may actually cause a net gain to their would-be victims.

It's easy to make the mistake of thinking that he uses the terms to refer to the basic character of an individual rather than to patterns of behavior, because of the way he talks about how stupid people are pretty much unwaveringly stupid, and they're born that way. This conflates the cause of stupidity with stupidity itself, however. What is inborn, and fundamental to the person's character, is something else that predisposes one to adopt a particular pattern of behavior -- not the pattern itself. Ultimately, according to Cipolla's theory, it seems that the fundamental character of a person predisposes that person to either "stupid" or "not stupid" behavior, overall -- with circumstances playing a significant role in determining whether a "not stupid" person's behavior will tend most toward "helpless", "bandit", or "intelligent" behavior.

There are, of course, people who are fundamentally prone to "helpless" behavior (stubborn altruists), as well as those who are fundamentally prone to "bandit" behavior (sociopaths), but they are exceptions rather than the rule, I think. Rather, many "bandits" and "helpless" people are simply those prone to "intelligent" motivations whose failures ensure their behavior patterns are not strictly "intelligent".

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 intuitive, colloquial understandings of those words we have when discussing other subjects.
It's a huge mistake to judge all trains by Amtrak's current condition. It's quite awful compared to modern trains in other parts of the world. You'd be surprised at how smooth and quiet modern trains can be, and that combined with wifi, nice seating and convenient stations makes it a very pleasant way to travel.
> From what I understand, we're at the data migration point, and we're waiting on EY for that.

s/working directly with/delaying/

http://support.github.com/discussions/site/721-network-feed-...
Bottomline, it's a business decision, I'm sure if staying with EngineYard was an option they would have gone that route. Moving to EC2 is probably a lot cheaper than other pricey, like RackSpace solutions. It's part of growing up, you sometimes have new friends, but never forget those you grew up with. I wonder how many new EY customer use their github accounts ?
The only problem I see with openness is that the GSM network is secure only as long as all the devices are in full control of operators. This should change ASAP because GSM sniffers/injectors are already in the hands of hackers that are starting to figure very well how the GSM network works and the vulnerabilities it has (not only about encryption algorithms in use, but think to all the TCP/IP stack bugs of the latest 20 years).

That said an open market where the user can upgrade to the next version of Android, or to a custom version of android, and generally, when the vendor of the OS is not necessarily the same as the hardware vendor is a good thing.
The Rise and Fall and Rise of U.S. Cities
No Black Swans in Financial Markets?
I click on 'threads' every once in a while to see who replied to me and what my karma is for my recent comments. Not exactly a hack, but I use it often.
59 points of consideration. Wow. That's a lot of soap boxing.

This article would be a lot more helpful with explanations and code examples.
We're moving to Rackspace.
What recession? Tech companies look to gain share in downturn
The human brain, it turns out, is even more efficient than previous estimates
"But being an awesome excellent programmer doesn't mean success in any real measurable way."

Being an awesome excellent violinist (say) doesn't mean success in any "measurable way" either. There is no absolute, objective ranking for violinist, but becoming an "awesome excellent" violinist is still just as hard or harder than becoming Richard Branson.
Just out of curiosity, what were your options that were cheaper than EC2, and why'd you reject them?
Ask HN: Any tips on giving speeches?
I know that public speaking is a skill that has a lot of power in business. People tend to work for people that have the skill. I cannot remember where the quote came from and I am paraphrasing a bit but the quote goes something like this: "You either know how to speak well or end up working for someone who does." I think that a lot of the people on HN give speeches regularly. So I was wondering if anyone has any good advice on giving a speech. I have to give a best mans toast at a wedding so it brings public speaking to the forefront of my mind.
One cannot be purely stupid or purely intelligent all the time. There are times when someone is simply standing around in the restroom brushing his teeth, for instance. This doesn't change anything about the accuracy of the core thesis as applied to life in general.

Mostly, what I've seen of "stupid" behavior (in Cipolla's use of the term "stupid") is the result of such motivations as spite. Spite appears to be one of the strongest motivators in human nature, and is purely destructive. It is, at its best, designed to not do the spiteful party any harm -- but no thought is put into doing oneself any good. It is often veiled in justifications related to evening some imaginary scales between a "bandit" and a "helpless" victim, but all too often it is simply spite beneath the surface -- in short, it is a special case of stupidity (and my own least favorite form of stupidity, because of its petty malevolence).

This has little or nothing to do with IQ and other conventional definitions of "intelligence" and "stupidity". It is, as I've said above, about patterns of behavior (and, to an extent, the motivations that produce those patterns).
Chrome adds new defence for cross-site scripting attacks
Modifying headlines is fine as long as you follow the Hacker News Guidlines[1]. Just don't try and mislead people with any changes.

[1]:http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sure is interesting. If tickets on the NC->NY circuit are less than airline tickets, it might be worthwhile (currently, airline tickets are only about fifty dollars more than amtrak tickets; and amtrak takes ~9 hours). Also interesting is the route between Raleigh and Charlotte - right now there are only two trains that do that, late morning and early afternoon trains that aren't even useful for business travelers.
If we can retrofit the foundries of the rustbelt to build this stuff, we might be able to give Japan a run for its money.

Maybe.

If we actually do it, instead of hemming and hawing about it.
> And when that framework is around long enough and has grown sufficiently complex, it will get abstracted again.

Eventually, it's just turtles all the way down.
Hair per se may not be a semiconductor but melanin, particulalry eumelanin (the melanin in darker hair) is! Indeed there's even been successful semi-c devices built using melanin. Such research a priori lends credence to this type of announcement.

hair is a well structured layered tube and this could provide a good scaffold for the eumelanin - but it seems not sufficient to create a photoelectric device.
The iPod Is Dead
The Accela is an Amtrak train that sometimes goes highway speeds (as opposed to, with Amtrak, almost never) and costs three times as much.

Blerg.
Join Toastmasters - http://www.toastmasters.org/

There's no substitute for actually doing it.
Cloud or dedicated/managed?
Switching Browsers - From Firefox to Safari/Chrome
JRubyConf - The day after RubyConf
But isn't the issue regarding high speed rail service about commuting? That is what I meant by mobility and where I believe the claimed benefits lie. People can live in a comparatively remote area while still being employed in a regional city -- the benefit being they might have a more suitable employer.

If that is the case, I would hope to see reasonable evidence showing that high-speed commuter trains would increase the commuter mobility from the level it is at now or possibly raise productivity (e.g. the not actively driving issue).
I've been tinkering with continuation passing web frameworks in Ruby, but haven't had time to really dive into making one. There is plenty of inspirational material out there e.g. Seaside. If you get anywhere, myself and probably others in the community would be interested to hear about it.

http://blog.extension.ws/11/modal_web_experiments
You will feel tense. Don't fight it.

Hold your hands behind your back as you face the audience just before you start.

Clench your hands into fists as tight as you can while also clenching up your butt.

Hold that pose and your breath for a few seconds and then relax and breath out.

Anyone facing you will not be able to tell what you're doing if you just clench your stress in your fists and your butt until you release it.
Mike Markson of Blekko: Eight hard truths about online media
Simon Peyton Jones: How to write a great research paper
I second toastmasters -- it really helped me discover what aspects of teaching I enjoy.

My tip would be to use stories/anecdotes, especially for something meant to be entertaining (vs. informative) for a best-man's speech. Think of some funny memories that can be linked together to give insights into the personality of the groom.
that was my guess, you guys have a big dev following, rackspace has marketing money that can be reallocated to hosting github.

good luck
It sounds like you took a legacy Amtrak train (does Acela go south of DC?). There is no comparison between Acela and standard Amtrak.
How can github fire EY when EY was giving them free stuff. Why doesn't github just pay EY for the services they are using?

This is another failure of Freemium. GH is only able to provide such large repos because they get free infrastructure.

I can't really blame EY for bailing. The partnership is no longer equitable. GH is getting something for nothing. I shouldn't say nothing, it's something, but it's not enough.
While the logic here may be sound, you would expect the statistics to bear it out and since antioxidants are a well-studied area even weak correlation between antioxidants and cancer should be present in these studies and to my knowledge, it's not.
That's a good tip for stress release. Thanks! I think I am going to use that.
If your service doesn't meet my needs, it doesn't matter how cheap it is - including $0. According to my understanding, EngineYard doesn't meet GitHub's needs anymore.
That would kill the majority of open source projects hosted on github, free hosting for public repos is one of the reasons it's so great. I'm willing to pay for private repos, but if I had to pay for my public ones too, I'd just not host them on github.
Non-Flash GView version: http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://research.microsoft.c...
Genius.com is Hiring Dev and QA
Because this is basically an advertisement for OmniPeek? They make an excellent product, but this is just astroturfing.
It is going to be interesting to see how the performance of Github and their freemium offering changes when they start paying for infrastructure somewhere else. Unless they can smooth talk another host into giving them free infrastructure.
How exactly can you be so sure about whether or not electromagnetic was "had"? How can you know for certain why he didn't say it was a hoax?

Btw, the thing was immediately tagged as a hoax on Slashdot, too quickly for me to even think on my own whether it made sense or not...
Found this on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qfYDEi4pVg

Anybody here from Nepal ?
Announcing The First Ever JRubyConf
Based on replies from my support queries about performance, they are aware that paying customers expect better/more-consistent performance than what we've had of late.
The thing you're not acknowledging is that for trips under 3-4 hours, highway speeds + highway overhead beats jet speeds + jet overhead. It's a coin flip whether driving Chicago -> Detroit is better than flying it.

You don't need to be better than highway speed to be extremely valuable. The Acela is a much easier way to get from NYC to Boston than driving (done both), and it's more reliable and sometimes faster than flying.
Custom Essays
Welcome to Bestessays.com, your source for original writing and research.
Q: How best to populate a new site?
I've posted something similar on Reddit - but didn't get very far (most of the responses degenerated into a joke, but that's probably because my example was about a dating site)

And, I saw a similar post here on HN which leads to the OP's blog at http://startupblog.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/inventing-demand/ - but I think that works only for places that do actually trade physical goods, like eBay or any store-like sites.

Anyway, I'm hoping I'd get more thoughtful insights here.

So the question:

How best to populate a new site? sites that don't actually trade goods? (or simply trade on virtual goods)

To put in context, think:
- craigslist
- reddit
- personals/dating
- music/book/reviews

Some suggested scraping existing content from similar sites to create the initial population (creating dummy user accounts) - but that seems icky. And, likely not tenable in the long-run - actual early users will detect/notice scraped articles.

Using/asking friends and colleagues might not be as effective (eg: not having enough good writer friends, or willing to participate in a dating site)

I think, there are also services out there that offer to populate your site (like this: http://www.evercurrent.com/adding_profiles.html) but again, new members will likely try to connect with the dummy accounts and not get a response, so will not come back or deem your site useful.
Announcing the First Ever JRubyConf
Twitter's New Terms of Service
The North-East Corridor (NEC) is basically our already-existing high speed train system: Amtrak's Acela. The problem is that it was a regular speed train system before that (and still is) and although some upgrades were made to the existing railbeds, their locations, slopes, and curves can't be changed much because of the population density throughout the region. That slows the trains down, and prevents real high speed trains in one of the US regions where it makes the most economic sense to have them. Business and government travel between Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington is HUGE, and the little jumper flights between these cities are lousy.
Motorola is so screwed right now they have NO choice but to put faith in the one OS that's looking for people to pick it up. They are seriously about be out of the race.
More likely, lots of people stuck in dead-end manufacturing jobs will have access to better careers in major/minor S/E metro areas, and a lot more locations in the S/E will become viable locations for business expansion, like new call centers, data centers, modern industrial, etc.
"One cannot be purely stupid or purely intelligent all the time."

That pretty much sums up what I was saying :) That's why I take issue with labeling people as 'stupid people' because like anything, it is rarely as cut-and-dried as that.
Yes, typos ruin online copy. As an analogy, consider watching a video where every so often the wrong frame is dropped into the flow. It is, I think, the thin edge of the wedge. Readers are already seeing another remarkable trend in copy - the lack of proper capitalization - or any capitalization.
Would the real "HTML5" File please stand up?
Indeed it is, but they claim to use hair, not to extract the melanin and use that.

Hair is, in fact one of the best organic isolators.
Repeated from downthread, but I think this is a red herring. NYC->BOS Acela doesn't need to be faster than a car to be tied with JetBlue for most effective way to get between those two cities. Cars are, in fact, a very effective way to get between point A and B when A->B < 4 hours. They're just a pain in the ass, and environmentally unsound.
Agreed.. Even linking to sites with forms that demonstrate some of these points would be worth while.

The list also assumes you are using every tool in the <form> toolbox, though that might of just been for completeness.
I am with you; I ride the northeast corridor frequently (both on the Acela and the regular regionals) and I've gotten hundreds of hours of work done while clanking along at (average) 45MPH.

The key advantages Amtrak has over a plane, in terms of getting work done:

* Every seat has a 120VAC outlet

* There's no cellphone prohibition

Now the latter can be somewhat obnoxious if you end up in a car of people who spend the whole trip yelling into their phones, but I always sit in the "Quiet Car," if one exists, to prevent this. And then I tether my phone to my laptop to use its internet connection, and I can do all my work from the train. (The connection drops going through the Hudson River tunnels and in a few other places, but in general there's coverage all the way down.)

A 6-hour train trip is for me almost always more productive than a (theoretically) 1.5-hour plane flight, because I can spend virtually all of the train trip working, and not screwing around waiting in line, going through security, etc. The way I normally schedule it, flying requires me to give up a half-day of work, while I'll put in a regular day's work from the train.

The equipment is outdated (and has a certain "Amtrak aroma" to it that makes me want to shower immediately afterwards) and it would be great if that 6-hour train trip only took 3 or 4, but they've already got the airlines beat along the NEC, as far as I'm concerned.
At the risk of being recursive, I'm going to invoke Heinlen's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

In that context, "stupidity" also means ignorance, which should avoid actual recursion.

That is, I don't think most stupid behavior is caused by spite (malice) but rather obliviousness (ignorance).
Not unless they think that TC is a bad joke that does harm to FaceBook in some way (by, for example, posting unverified stories about FaceBook before taking the time to fact-check with FB).
Learning to think
ArsTechnica discusses the same thing with some additional details at http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/09/nerve-cells-have...
Engineering an Impossible Supersonic Car - 1000mph
I see, so even if they did pay, it still wouldn't be fast enough. So free even has its costs, in terms of dissatisfied customers.
The problem with many of the cities on this plan: no good public transit once you get off the city-to-city train.
I'm baffled. Doesn't the top of the article say that Wozniak is known for pulling practical jokes like ordering 4000 cups of coffee from Starbucks? And then the end of the article shows Steve Jobs doing that? What am I missing?
There is no planned US route even remotely reaching 12h.

Last year's current route from Atlanta, GA to Washington, DC was 13 hours.

> I took a train when I moved from Alabama to the DC metro area last year

Care = none. We're talking high-speed rail here, not 60 years old trainsets on shit lines.

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. :)

Uh no it's not, at a party you're supposed to talk to people and socialize. In a train you're supposed to do your own stuff and not bother other travelers.

Again, "Also, I dont understand people who prefer driving 8 hours, rather than sitting in a train, stress free and can actually use their time to work/read/socialize", you can see I was responding to ujjwalg, who'd offered up his experience with India's non-high-speed, socializing-appropriate trains. :)

Anyway, it sounds like you're talking about commuting, which I do take a train for, and which I'd be happy to take high-speed rail for, if it was easy to do. I don't mind being on a train for 30 minutes when I have someplace to be. Actually taking hours-long trips by train, however, is not my thing, especially since anyplace a train serves is likely to be served by plane as well, more quickly.
Please, write it up and post it to HN! It deserves its own discussion.
Fortunately no speeches for me. But the few times I had to speek to a bunch of people to do a presentation it was hard enough. The trick I picked up from a friend is to pick out one person in the audience, address them but let your eyes wander around so everybody else is included too, make eye contact if the audience is small, if the audience is larger spread your attention around.

Good luck!
I heard about toastmasters before. What are the meetings actually like?