skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The $4/million actually is not based on compute time, it's based on data transfer in/out of AWS. If I included compute time, it would be higher.

And it's the bandwidth aspect that makes web crawling not feasible on AWS. Yes, you have a few thousand nodes, but they're all going through a handful of external IPs, which will cause serious performance issues.. the worst case is that you'll get blocked entirely from the sites you're trying to crawl.

In other words, the bandwidth is not parallelizable on the cloud.
I think that the dangers of majority-conformist thinking and other groupthink behaviors are very real and should be discouraged. I don't think hiding comment scores will have that effect, though it might make it more difficult to recognize when it happens.

The one thing in this experiment that might (I intuit) help discourage groupthink related behaviors is hiding one's own score from oneself, because people will then be less emboldened when they're being idiots just for expressing popular opinions. Unfortunately, this will also (I intuit) discourage people when they're being smart from as readily taking another look at whether what they've said is idiotic when others recognize the idiocy.

This strikes me as something of a parallel to when people sometimes claim that programming languages should be made "safer" at the expense of power provided for the programmer, and does not seem like a good direction to take the site.
Google’s 11th Birthday Logo
The article is right - demand freedom from free!

I've been working with open-source software for 15 years. Very early on it was clear to me that GPL is not very compatible with commercial enterprises, for exactly the reasons specified in the article.

It is a waste of time having to evaluate or code around the ability to use/ship GPL software with your own commercial stack. A waste of time.

OTOH, all my MIT/BSD code happily works perfectly without a thought or worry about legal ramifications. MYSQL is for me the canonical example of the crap that goes on with GPL software.

All of the open-source software I produce is MIT/BSD style.

I don't have any problem with FSF wanting there to be tons of GPL software. It's just not useful for me. There are clearly some social goods from GPL software -- knowing it has to be virally free is useful to that stack of software. It just doesn't play nice enough with non-FREE software to be very useful to commercial interests.
Wow I learned so much more from crunchbase than that piece. This is very rare: I usually really dig pieces written by the founders.

Just in this case the writing was very scattered and repetitive.

Most of my questions like what were they doing before diapoers.com; how they got the domain; what venture did they do before remained unanswered.
I'd be interested to hear others' thoughts on the phrase from Matt Asay's piece where he quotes Jason Perlow as saying:

"But some people ... will use only free and open source software
for the sake of ideological reasons alone"

The part I'm curious about is the ending "for the sake of ideological reasons alone." To me, "ideology" refers to the values that drive us-- the reasons we do things. Certainly, Stallman is driven by ideology, but isn't Eric Raymond as well? Aren't we all?

I understand that there are non-ideological reasons for things-- like you started crying because you learned your dog had died. You're having an immediate, emotional reaction; there's no rational thought involved. But I don't understand the distinction between "pragmatism" and "ideology" in the realm of rational thought, like choosing software licenses. In my experience, when someone asks me to be "pragmatic," it is the same as someone asking me to do something that seems like a bad idea.

They're usually requests like, "Let's just copy a little bit of this code off Sourceforge and act like it's ours. They won't mind. Come on, be pragmatic." Or maybe, "If you would release that code under the BSD license, we could use it in our proprietary commercial applications. Come on, be pragmatic."

I'd love it if someone could give me a better way to think about the difference between pragmatism and ideology, or help me understand why I continually disagree with other people about this sort of thing. My best guess is that people who ask me to be "pragmatic" are just full of crap, or at least some of them are, but I'm also open to the possibility that I'm just misunderstanding the world.
Hands down, but at the same time if he hadn't run the site properly the domain would probably be linking to amazon.com or something by now.

The domain grab really was like the land grab of the west in the US, first come first serve and if you defended your property then you're now a millionaire!
His name is 'by'.
For those who haven't read Paul Graham's essay on software patents I highly recommend it. It's wonderfully insightful, and gave me perspectives I never considered.

http://paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html
"Talented Britons are gradually being replaced by Indian workers"

Are the Indians equally talented or is competence an inherently "British" trait while menial labor the forte of the Indians? Submitter, why sex up the article by using an 11th-paragraph sentence for a title?
I know it is somewhat jargony, but FLOSS, meaning Free (Libre) and Open Source Software, is what "Free software" means. I think that makes clear that OSS is FLOSS without the "FL." The problem (often mentioned) is that "free" is overloaded in English.
Oh! I'm so trained to seeing the "X points by somebody" I didn't even think of that.
Your response is interesting to me. I agree with almost everything you wrote, but all of the open-source software I produce is GPL'd.

I think the difference is that you want your software to be useful to commercial interests, while I don't. I've gotten a lot of benefit from what you call the GPL "stack of software," and I'd rather advance that than the commercial stack that I (mostly) can't afford to use.
Yes, it is syntactic sugar for composition. It exists to make source code more self-documenting because you can see that a function is "decorated" at the point of its definition, rather than some other location where the conceptual context is lost.

The best common use case I can think of for it is web interfaces with access control:

@login_required
def profile(...):
#...

@admin_required
def ban_user(...):
#...

Decorators have also been used for great justice in unit testing frameworks and GUI libraries.

Your example does look a little overzealous, which is why people don't normally use decorators in that way. Usually you'll only see one decorator per function.
Zebra kick
Today, almost everyone in California owns a website. However, as there might be many others that are providing the very same service like you, you need to make your website distinguishable and stand out from the crowd.
My wife is a big The Mighty Boosh fan and reads a lot of Lewis Carroll, and the other night, doing a crossword, asked: "Is there a word spelled.. i-n-t-o? In-toe?"
you got modded down because your comment has nothing to do with the topic at hand. perhaps you meant your comment to go in some other thread.
The surprising ways that metaphors shape your world
I already cited the source of the code: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/

Specifically, the Perl version you find suspect can be found here: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=bi...

And it really was mostly random. I picked lua because I knew some people who used it, and was pretty sure it was a somewhat similar language to Perl in terms of problems its designed to solve, but that I'd never seen it before. I picked binary trees mostly because I was pretty sure both languages would have results for that test.

I wanted to see if it would be easier or harder to read the Lua vs. the Perl. It was easier for me to understand the Lua than the Perl, and I have attempted to explain that.

I don't care if you believe me or not. To anyone who doesn't already program in Perl full time: go to that site and pick random samples of code to read. Read through the various different solutions. Decide for yourself which language is most annoying to deal with.

For the record, here is the lua version of the same function.

local function BottomUpTree(item, depth)
if depth > 0 then
local i = item + item
depth = depth - 1
local left, right = BottomUpTree(i-1, depth), BottomUpTree(i, depth)
return { item, left, right }
else
return { item } -- Faster for LuaJIT: return { item, false }
end
end
The journal rankings for physics appear to be bogus.

1. Rev Mod Phys
2. Mat Sci Eng R
3. Annu Rev Phys Chem
4. Phys Rep
5. Rep Prog Phys
6. Nano Lett
7. Prog Polym Sci
8. Adv Mater
9. Phys Rev Lett
10. Adv Polym Sci

Most agree that the top journals are:
1. Nature
2. Science
3. Nature Physics
4. Phys. Rev. Lett.
5. ...

rev. mod. phys is a journal of review articles
The gyroscopic action of the wheels actually has very little effect on stability. It is the fact that the front wheel counter-steers when you get out of equilibrium that is the major reason for staying upright.

EDIT: Here's the link: http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~hemh/gyrobike.htm
I'm not trying to sex up the title at all. I thought the original title: "British IT workers 'crowded out'" was too vague. What does "crowded out" really mean? And the 11th paragraph sentence from an IT worker who was affected summed it up more nicely than the author.
feed starving man.
starving man survives to father 2 children in a region that obviously could not even support him.
we've just doubled suffering in our system.

when you pour money into a country and you see no increase in the standard of living because 1: the aid is siphoned off by corruption and used for further violence 2: the population increases up to the new maximal carrying capacity

should you really continue aid?

see also: dead aid
http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374...
It looks like they've had to bring in a large collection of vendors in order to solve the technical challenges (Remedy, McAfee, MS's AV & System Center, Aruba Airwave) and functional requirements (iTunes, MS Office, Adobe CS4).

So with that suite of software, will the netbooks perform reasonably well? (Mine would not).
GCD libdispatch w/Blocks support working on FreeBSD
You get nothing, because it is no image. Which does not enhance the information gained.
Onelook.com is awesome -- and you just showed me it's even awesomer than I thought. Thanks for that.
What if you're a pragmatic scientist? Science is funded by the people. If they aren't excited about research, funding may drop. If we have to devote some of our resources, even a lot, into activities that keep people excited, then that's fine, so long as it's good for science (and the people) in the long run.
It takes time to accumulate upvotes, so if you click a story before it has been widely read you can't quickly scan which comments may be headed up.
Please.

If it's so dubious, why do the fanboys not question that remark, but immediately leap to defend it and either try to redefine "traitor" as meaning something else or declare that they agree about the supposed "treason"?

Now, to be terribly fair, it's probably true that even if he didn't say it, everybody would be acting the same way. Nobody, even his fans, really doubts that he would say it. It's his style, and it's the exact sort of obnoxious remark his fanboys are used to defending and supporting.

EDIT: Ultimately, my complaint is about the fanboys. Someone made a dickmove. That someone is an icon to the fanboys, but he hasn't actually done anything in years besides be an icon to them, so it's barely even a story before the fans get involved.
This is interesting but it is not ranking or mapping scientific knowledge. What is mapped is academic fields. The scientific content is not mapped or ranked.
GPL is not very compatible with commercial enterprises that sell software, I think you mean.

It's perfectly compatible with commercial enterprises that only need to use software that lets them get on with their actual business. In fact, it has certain strategic advantages in this case; after all, the explicit purpose of the GPL is to maximize freedom for end users, not developers.
Do you really need to sterilize something before sending it to Venus?
Free Hyper-V book
"but without copyright/patent incentives, X wouldn't exist" as "the Linux-doesn't-exist theory of intellectual property"

Linux was based on Unix. Unix was developed and marketed by a company that enforced its intellectual property in it. Would they have funded both activities without any way to own the results (i.e. copyright)? If Unix did not exist, would Linux?

An aside on patents: regular expression matching using DFAs was patented by Ken Thompson (for his employer) http://www.wikipatents.com/3568156.html
Thanks for these suggestions everyone!
actually they don't do this, because this decreases the control a customer has, and customers like to feel like they control something, even if it is as silly as selecting the line where they wait.
There could be more subfields in here. I mean, one bubble for all of Mathematics?
Berntb. Please email me, goladus@goladus.com, if you would like to discuss my credibility. Otherwise please stop with the baseless character attacks.
>Just as an example, my karma just jumped a bunch of points. Was it because of the above post, or was it due to europe waking up to some posts made a few hours ago?

Do you really care so much?
Anyway, If I were pg I would play around actually: half users see votes, the other half orange dot or whatever. I bet the numerical scores create a sheep effect and people who see high numbers are more likely to rate comments up.
Compare and contast:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=843709

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=396550

These are different, but clearly it's the same sort of idea with different presentations or representations.
Presence probably takes more juice than the billion messages, and a good chunk of these servers can probably be there as fallbacks in case of failures. Just a supposition.

They do use C++ for the chat system, it's mainly the channels/presence (If memory serves me right) that are implemented in Erlang.
In real life, no, but before it was discovered that under the clouds of Venus lies a surface where tin is a liquid, Venus was home to tropical jungles full of large, dangerous critters, and enormous swamp-based civilizations. Venus was also strangely prone to generating aliens with telepathy.

Just as science cost us Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars, science cost us fantastic Venusian civilizations.

Blasted science.
"Most agree": my experience is that many physicists have different rankings than you suggest.
I don't really see the point of taking away the rating information displayed as numeric scores, then adding back display of some of that information as an orange dot.

If the idea is to not show the the information the scores represent, then don't show it, even abstracted as little dots. If we do want the information, just show the scores.
He's also racist, though that may be accredited to his senility: http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/10/18/science.race/inde...
Then perhaps the moral here is that it's possible to be successful regardless of how hard you work, and that different people have different habits that lead to success.

I'm a fundamentally lazy person who does nothing all day and has enough frequent flashes of brilliance to get away with it. Friends of mine have told me that they're not capable of working like that, though I have my doubts: I've always been curious if my method of productivity can be replicated, and one day I think I'll put an effort into figuring that out. But what's clear is that two people working in radically different ways can produce as much in the end.
> but it's fun to telnet into a message queue and issue plain ascii commands

You can do this with Redis too.
A pragmatic scientist might realize that a discovery in itself is neither good nor bad, and would fight for the public interest of doing science for the purpose of discovery, rather than politicizing what they feel the public is interested in discovering.
I'm confused, advertising doesn't affect the consideration aspect of the buying process, marketing does. Social Media Marketing is what affects the consideration process online not advertising, so purchasing intent would be more influenced by SMM correct?
Finite Differences of Types
I very much doubt those machines will last 4 years. Even if they are taken well care of by the student, other students might not (so you get to keep your lunch money but not your netbook). And with only 2GB of RAM, it won't be able to run any of those high-end programs in just a few years unless they aren't updated to the newest versions.
I've never liked this argument. Why does it have to be X or Y?

How do you propose to make Detroit livable by spending a few billion? Give it to everyone who lives in Detroit? Subsidize unsustainable businesses based in and around Detroit? Same question in Africa, really - once you've given out all the clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets you can, then what?

Nation building turns out to be hard (who knew). If the US has trouble maintaining its own standard of living, how will throwing money at the rest of the world really help? Yes, there is low hanging fruit, but there's also money for it (see: Gates foundation, etc.)

We have the resources to do both. It's not a matter of money. It's a matter of political will, of collective will, and of both problems just being HARD - and let's face it, I suspect space flight is the easier of the two.
Very good information, but for the rest of us I'd recommend night time tea, no caffeine past six and reading before bed instead of digital stuff.

Or PM asprin :P
> at the point of its definition

Ok, that makes sense, thanks. I guess needing syntax for this is a consequence of Python's quirky lambdas. In languages with full lambdas, you can just wrap an anonymous function at the point of definition.

profile = login_required(function (...) ...) -- in Lua

(define profile (login-required (lambda (...) ...))) ; in Scheme

let profile = login_required(fun ... -> ...) (* in OCaml *)

Putting the decorator on its own line draws attention to it, though. This is probably also another instance of Python's "flat is better than nested" design choice.
We need more guys like that. "We don't have refresh buttons in the user interface, because that would just be horrible."
Your brain is like a muscle, it needs both exercise and rest and the more you train it, the more it can do.
Reverse Image Search: Who are the Players
Unix was developed as a side result of a couple hackers wanting to play a game that wouldn't run well on the systems available, so they ported it to a new system and then wrote an OS for that system as well (because hey, why not). At the time, they were being paid to pretty much screw around with technology by virtue of working at a large research facility funded by a corporation with a government-granted monopoly.

Unix wasn't even officially acknowledged by Bell Labs until a couple years after it was developed, and wasn't marketed for use outside the labs until a few years later.

So, no, I don't think the early development of Unix had much to do with the ability to enforce intellectual property.
How to listen to audio books while working without missing anything important?
Suppose you would like to listen to an audio book while working on something.

The problem is that some activities (e.g., programming) make it quite likely for you to miss important parts of the book.

How can you get around this problem without too much distraction from your work?

Sample idea: an audio book could have an audio alert before each important part perhaps as determined by the author(s) and/or other readers/listeners.
I agree that the system is a mess, but defining exactly what "software" patents are is difficult. In machine inventions, the actual invention is increasingly happening in the software.

Patenting an organic molecule or a gene is a different, and also flawed case. But most machines, business plans and other inventions could be reduced to software. As 3d printing becomes more common, this will get more and more common.

Algorithms currently aren't patentable, but due to semantic manipulation of the meaning of "algorithm", people are patenting algorithms by calling them a "system that does x". If software patents were abolished, what would prevent applicants from using the exact same sort of strategy to get around them? Rather than patenting a piece of code, people would file a patent for a machine that does everything the code in question does.
It's more conventional here to leave the title unchanged, just to avoid sensationalism and misdirection.

I am sure you meant well, but what's stopping a pro-immigration submitter from underplaying the effect of migrants on the British labor market by quoting any of the company statements including this :"They are not filling roles that require a permanent UK presence.", etc. Changing the subjective unnecessarily reframes the debate, and what could have been an objective piece becomes a subject propaganda pamphlet (not to mention the cred-hijacking associated with putting the publication's name beside an inflammatory/unsubstantiated claim)

Of course, there is also the risk of excessive meta-debate from pedantic jerkwads like myself.

Regards.
please share your experience! I don't take this ranking wankery too seriously. There are some papers that I really love that were published is lesser known journals. I guess I was talking about AMO and cond.mat. which are the majority of physicists. These lists are obviously biased towards experimentalists, although theory occasionally makes it into science / nature.
It sounds like you are describing linear types or uniqueness types, not Haskell's monad solution to mutable state. (Haskell supports neither linear nor uniqueness types.) The aerial view of Haskell mutable state is that every function that wants to "really" mutate state secretly takes a "world" parameter and returns a new "world" parameter. Mutable variables are just references to some named "thing" in this world value. It appears to mutate because the thing to which it refers also appears to mutate because the world is being swapped out from underneath it. There is of course only one world value (RAM) and this is really and truly being mutated. Only at the most abstract level can this be considered immutable, but there are still theoretical advantages to operating at this level, e.g., there is an implementation of the IO monad (IOSpec I think?) that truly does keep a copy of the world around, which is useful for testing and such.

The main difference is that Haskell maintains uniqueness of only one secret paramter, the world, while linear or uniqueness types can do it on a per-value basis (which sounds to me like what you described.) The bad news is that this is much less interesting from a theoretical point of view---within the monad side effects are still unconstrained---but from a practical point of view it means imperative programming in haskell is pretty accessible, funny vocabulary notwithstanding.
So, you noted that the guy linked to his own blog?

That's some detective work.
I had posted this partly because it offered another point of view on the health care debate, but mostly as an example of how people can misunderstand data and come to suspect conclusions.

I would think this is of general interest to people looking to understand a market or some behavior. Certainly more comments would be welcome.
Challenge-response: the use of incorrect responses in validating identity
Ooops sorry, I posted in the wrong topic indeed. This post was about "working hard is overrated".
My site uses 960.gs but not for EVERYTHING. Also not sure how creative the use is but here ya go - http://www.launchly.com