skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some more quotes I wrote down from the posts in the sequence (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Evolution):

We are simply the embodied history of which organisms did in fact survive and reproduce, not which organisms ought prudentially to have survived and reproduced.
--Eliezer Yudkowsky, An Alien God

Mutation is random, but selection is non-random. This doesn't mean an intelligent Fairy is reaching in and selecting. It means there's a non-zero statistical correlation between the gene and how often the organism reproduces. Over a few million years, that non-zero statistical correlation adds up to something very powerful.
--Eliezer Yudkowsky, An Alien God

"Don't think that, in the political battle between evolutionists and creationists, whoever praises evolution must be on the side of science. Science has a very exact idea of the capabilities of evolution. If you praise evolution one millimeter higher than this, you're not "fighting on evolution's side" against creationism. You're being scientifically inaccurate, full stop. You're falling into a creationist trap by insisting that, yes, a whirlwind does have the power to assemble a 747! Isn't that amazing! How wonderfully intelligent is evolution, how praiseworthy! Look at me, I'm pledging my allegiance to science! The more nice things I say about evolution, the more I must be on evolution's side against the creationists!
But to praise evolution too highly destroys the real wonder, which is not how well evolution designs things, but that a naturally occurring process manages to design anything at all."
--Eliezer Yudkowsky, The Wonder of Evolution

"One grad student can do things in an hour that evolution could not do in a billion years." (Yudkowsky: "According to biologists' best current knowledge, evolutions have invented a fully rotating wheel on a grand total of three occasions.")
--biologist Cynthia Kenyon, in Evolutions Are Stupid (But Work Anyway)

"Individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-executers rather than as fitness-maximizers."
-- John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, The Psychological Foundations of Culture.
Because Ruby 1.8 threading sucks you pay a large memory price (ie a process) for each concurrent request in flight. A fronting proxy allows your backends to write out the response as fast as possible and move on to another request while the proxy spoon feeds the response to slow clients.

Also, nginx is going to be more efficient for serving static files, though most larger apps will have broken such requests out to a separate set of domains likely serviced by a cdn.
The latest x264 can get away with about 800-1000kbps average bitrate for nearly-perfect rips of a DVD (and down to as low as 300-500kbps if you're willing to lose the film grain). Most web services are worse--since they don't use x264 (a large number still use ancient formats like FLV...). There are some exceptions: Vudu, for example, uses x264 and is able to get tolerable quality 1080p in 2.8mbps. But I personally wouldn't bother with that--at 2.8mbps your 1080p certainly won't have any more detail than 720p. Of course, most people don't notice this because most Blu-rays don't have more detail than 720p either.

Note that DVDs themselves are already highly lossy; most DVDs have been lowpassed before encoding, so they have significantly less detail than their resolution would suggest. This is rather unfortunate, as the tradition has stuck with Blu-ray, despite it being completely counterproductive when using a good H.264 encoder.

Broadcast is an even worse situation; most broadcast television is atrocious quality-wise. This is usually because of outdated technology (MPEG-2), highly-lossy transcoding to save bandwidth (Comcast is a huge offender here), or just plain absurd bandwidth restrictions (a major television station in Japan uses 4mbps H.264 for 1080i). Of course, this is all aggravated by the requirement of constant bitrate and short keyframe intervals for broadcast streams.
You'll get better performance with

for (var i=0, l=myLinkCollection.length; i<l; i++) { }

http://robertnyman.com/2008/04/11/javascript-loop-performanc...
Oh, I don't disagree MySQL's replication is a pain in the ass as well - but the barrier to entry is much lower and from the outward appearance (e.g. looking at it for the first time) it looks easy and functional. Slony on the other hand appears daunting from the first look.
If anyone knows a way to take the over on this, please let me know. Even if the claim is that DVD rental revenue will be streaming revenue just for Netflix, and it's not a general industry claim, I'm still taking the over. I can buy claims that actual streams may be higher, because the high utilization early adopters will stream more. But revenue? Overall userbase? General market? I laugh.

No, seriously, I'd like to do a two-year LEAP/long bet on this.
Crockford is awesome. Here's one of my favorite pieces he wrote on his jslint javascript parser (written in javascript): http://javascript.crockford.com/tdop/tdop.html
It's a royal pain in the ass.

Like everyone else in the world, I already have a well-established workflow for managing usernames and passwords. My favorite tool is 1Password for the Mac. It works seamlessly with the majority of websites. It doesn't work well with Stack Overflow. Most sites log me in with one keypress; Stack Overflow now takes two keypresses and a mouse click, and that's after I carefully set it up by hand, because the auto-learning feature doesn't work with OpenID.

I resisted using OpenID for months because I didn't want my login on Stack Overflow to be tied inextricably to my Yahoo or Google identity. I can change a password, and on well-designed sites I can even change a username, but I can't change my OpenID on Stack Overflow by any means that I can find.

(Yeah, I know I could have used some kind of identity-forwarding fu to use my own domain as an OpenID, and then forwarded the actual task of running an OpenID server to some other entity that I could change at will. Whatever. I don't want to have to read a goddamn FAQ in order to log in to Stack Overflow, of all things. Even the Treasury Department, which has the most baroque login scheme I have ever seen, involving a personalized plastic card and an onscreen keyboard, doesn't make me read a manual in order to use their site.)

(And, yeah, I know that there are honest and hardworking startups dedicated to providing me with an OpenID. Not to put too fine a point on it: If my Stack Overflow ID is going to be inextricably tied to somebody else's website being up, I'm going to pick a website that has been up for at least one decade, and promises to remain up for as many future decades as possible. If my identity can't be made to live as long as me, I've got a problem.)

So I finally gave in and signed up with my Yahoo OpenID. I have no idea why I picked them over Google. I doubt it was for their track record of preserving user privacy.

But the pain did not end, because I proceeded to forget which ID I had used. In their zeal to ensure that everyone on Earth is pre-provided with an OpenID, the standard's proponents have created a monster: My OpenIDs outnumber my uses for OpenID by an order of magnitude. I have a bunch of Google accounts, and I tried one or two of them, and then I just decided that I had better things to do than write that post on Stack Overflow. If I hadn't happened to have left another machine logged in to the site with a very long-term cookie, my username would be gone forever. (They can't email you a hint, because they don't capture email addresses.) At least now I've taught it to 1Password, and if that fails me I can Google up this rant. ;)

Sadly, all of this has had the Pavlovian effect of making me feel really angry every time I see the login screen at Stack Overflow, a truly useful and even inspiring site which I read fairly often. Never a second chance to make a first impression, I guess.
Only with JS <1.7. Otherwise you get block scope by using 'let instead of 'var.
The proper definition of a species is that individuals can interbreed and have fertile offspring. It's impossible to test whether two fossils are the same species. The usual assumption is that if they look different they were different species, but that can be wrong for many reasons. Dogs, for example, are all one species, but you might well classify Chihuahuas and Labradors separately based on their remains
The issue is the costs, as always. Are they fully loading their salary and overhead costs?

Of course, I have crazy love for niche online marketplaces like this, so I congratulate them for seeing the competition and doing it anyway.
This is at least the 4th article on Ravelry's scaling accomplishments here on HN.
Rap Viet | Rap Việt |
Can you elaborate? Why do you need to fix the number of digital copies in a geographic area?

When we all went from using Blockbusters (=akin to library) to using Netflix (=akin to what is being proposed upthread), did it break the economic model for DVDs?
So let's get this straight: consumers of movies are going from low-bitrate DVDs to BluRay and even 3-D TV in the future, and this guy is predicting consumers going for lower quality movies because the delivery mechanism is faster?

Hell if I know, but it sure looks like hardware manufacturers are making different bets looking at the same market. Perhaps NetFlix spins off into a low-end video-at-any-quality delivery service and another part of the market goes 3-D?
Ask HN: How can I make the most of Startup School?
This question is for anyone who has attended Startup School. What did you do to make the most of the experience? Looking back, is there anything that you would have done different?
Netflix themselves recommend 2 Mb/s for "DVD quality". That puts then into the "good home broadband" range.

(I get 1.5 Mb/s on my ADSL at home, but I am in a rural area)
I'm constantly surprised by how many people can't tell the difference between HD and standard DVD. I even know some people who don't really care if it's VHS or DVD (well, one girl at least).

Maybe their research shows that a big portion of people are fine with DVD quality, and that the others will just rent the blu-rays via mail while waiting for streaming HD?
Hunt for Modern Polymaths: 20 Living Examples
It rewrites the flash and javascript so that they call your reverse proxy instead of the original domain?
None of the above!

The only thing remotely html5-ey about it is the use of <!doctype html>, which sane people have been using for years. I don't think he's using any features less than a decade old!
Only the first sentence is from Kenyon.
The "Northern California Digital Library" (http://califa.lib.overdrive.com) already loans out digital books (read with Adobe Digital Editions software) to patrons of many Northern California library branches. The system enforces limits on how many copies of any book can be checked out and so is just like a library. It's convenient but the selection is, for now, limited. I've found some good books there and really prefer this to going to the library.

And the DRM appears to just work. I don't mind this model for books, music (I'm a Napster-to-Go subscriber), and when the first viable stream-for-rent system for movies arrives I won't mind that either.
That's the thing of it -- obviously there is a market for "video at any speed" and a market for hi-fi/prosumers.

For instance, research has shown that more people actually like hacked-up, low-bandwidth mp3s over higher-quality ones. So perhaps this guy is thinking the video market goes the same direction? That the price for bits will always trend towards zero?

If so, this will be a major shift in the movie business -- as big as MP3 file-sharing was to the music industry.
Netflix "DVD quality" is nowhere near true DVD quality. It also only steams stereo audio.
More streaming:
http://somafm.com
http://etn.fm
I'm going to advance a counter-argument (just because I'm like that). Jason makes the argument that these people are getting pitches from individuals who don't have a quality product or connections. I'd argue that's its almost always connections. That's what I experienced at digg, which was in general a second rate idea (it was done before by kuro5hin and delicious mostly) but was advanced by the ultimate insider. This is just simply creating a market, Jason feels threatened because while he may have come from the bottom, he's no longer there, and this is a direct threat to his (and every other insider's) influence.

I'm not a big fan of Ayn Rand, but there's a great passage in "Atlas Shrugged" about how once you destroy markets, it becomes all about influence and insiders and "who knows who." This is just a new market mechanism that subverts the insiderish nature of the angel community.

It doesn't mean it will work, but it's a reaction to scarcity controlled by influence, and is just creating a market mechanism where one is needed.
Why? It only took ~4 years for DVD to obliterate VHS, and even less time for DVD sales to exceed those for VHS [1]. Hastings doesn't say if the replacement for DVD will be BluRay or streaming, but I think rapid consumer uptake of new delivery technologies is a reasonable prediction to make.

[1] http://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/gtp/wvprodretail.html
I think you missed the point. The point was not that github stopped using haproxy, but that it no longer needs to use it.

Assuming haproxy can work with unix sockets, github could configure nginx/unicorn to use it, but with unicorn its current work load does not require additional load balancing acrobatics beyond what the unix socket does.

Similarly, many rails sites use thin/nginx or mongrel/nginx and do not even have a workload that necessitates haproxy.

Plus, haproxy adds another layer of complexity, configuration, and management, which is nice to avoid if you can.
I really recommend http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel both for speed and so that if Flash crashes it's mostly only killing itself.
I think it's great Jason is working to eliminate this... but just to play devil's advocate here: TechCrunch50 essentially charged $3000 to present in the "DemoPit" by requiring purchase of a conference ticket...

edit: make that $1500, they give applicants 50% off
From the same web page-

Link to Theoretical Computer Science Blogs:
http://wiki.henryfarrell.net/wiki/index.php/Computer_Science
Can you share your setup please?
> Note that DVDs themselves are already highly lossy; most DVDs have been lowpassed before encoding, so they have significantly less detail than their resolution would suggest. This is rather unfortunate, as the tradition has stuck with Blu-ray, despite it being completely counterproductive when using a good H.264 encoder.

Could you explain what you mean by "lowpassed"?

Any idea what keeps the adoption of modern x264 codecs? Are they expensive to license? Is it just inertia?

You just made me wonder how good things would look if they did it right... Do you think it would make a big difference to the untrained eye (you sound like someone in the video business)?
A Polymath is someone who knows a lot about a lot and whose expertise fills a number of significant subject areas.

I know that there are lots of people who'll fit the bill.

Who do you recommend as a living example of a modern polymath?
This is a non-trivial problem.
For what it's worth someone asked Joel this after the first DevDays in Boston and he said adding a normal username/password login was at the top of their list.
My interpretation of the second sentence: With a space that is heavily dominated by getty/istock, why do these companies enter the market in the first place and how do they manage to make a profit?

[edit]: On second thought, perhaps he is talking about photographers. Asking why they bother selling their pictures on any site other than getty/istock since they get all the eyeballs.
True, my mistake. Will correct it.
MySQL has --safe-updates (aka --i-am-a-dummy), which will refuse to execute UPDATE and DELETE statements without a key in the WHERE clause.
Lowpassing means performing a frequency transform and removing the highest-frequency coefficients. It has a similar effect to taking an image, downscaling it, and then upscaling it again (except without the aliasing that the latter produces). Wikipedia probably has more information.

You can tell the difference yourself easily: get a DVD and Blu-ray version of the same movie and downscale the Blu-ray to DVD resolution. You'll notice the Blu-ray is still a lot sharper and has more detail.

Also, note that x264 is not H.264. H.264 is an international video standard published by the United Nations; x264 is a particular open-source implementation developed by Loren Merritt, me, and a few others. Not all H.264 encoders are very good, in fact, a lot are quite bad. See http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=102 for a comparison I did a bit back and http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=164 for some technical information on why.

The reason that adoption of newer video formats has been slow, at least on the internet, is primarily that there is a huge (server-side) install base of old technology that would take effort and expertise to convert to use new technology. It wouldn't be expensive--in fact, it would save billions of dollars a year in bandwidth--but inertia is a powerful force, as is simple lack of knowledge and awareness. Of course, many sites have already converted over; Youtube and Facebook now both use x264 for most of their videos.
I have had no problems (or difficulties) with OpenID - set up an account on myopenid.com, pasted two lines into the source of the root page of my domain that delegates to myopenid, and then I just use that.
I think India will have reservations till 85% of all registered marriages are Inter-Caste.
It's probably better business for Netflix to buy servers and big fat pipes than to buy more gigantic warehouses full of discs.

The cost of handling and mailing discs probably stays fairly constant, while the cost of handling bits goes down (as you said).

Netflix certainly isn't an uninterested observer in this. Things might naturally trend toward more streaming, but Netflix is probably pushing hard too.
I really appreciate innovation, technology, and the power of technology to transform our quality of life, but I don't support the push to bring latest and greatest technology to schools as a first priority. Education has much more important problems that need to be fixed first.

When I was in high school, the school decided to replace old DOS machines that ran Borland compilers with Visual Studio. I bet on paper it sounded like a great idea (teach kids newer technology), except no more than three or four kids out of the entire school of five thousand were capable of mastering simple, linear DOS programs. The rest of the kids just vandalized the machines.

Spending all that money on brand new Pentiums with Windows didn't advance the quality of education one bit. Spending it on teachers that can actually be engaging, requiring higher standards, involving parents, and bringing in a little bit of discipline would have done a lot more for less.

Getting broadband to every school is great, once we fix more pressing problems. Broadband on its own will just give most kids a better youtube connection.
Paid advertisements (PR BS) on HN? =) Did I miss something?
Ask HN: Any good JavaScript books?
I've seen the cool things that developers are doing with JavaScript. Especially http://sonspring.com/journal/jquery-desktop.

I'm wondering what the best book on the subject is. Just two things:

- It has to be freely downloadable online
- It has to have assignments at the end of the chapter

As for the assignments thing, I think it's really great. It's the best way to show yourself that you learned what you read.

Oh, and if it matters, I know Java and Python.

Edit: formatting
Yeah, this is a pretty cool idea. The Science Museum of Minnesota has a very long staircase that's musical just like this one, pretty interesting idea.
If the studios are smart, it's Blu-ray. If they're not, it's streaming. BUT I'm willing to take the long bet and say DVDs last longer than two years, regardless.

If you are willing to take the other side, let's make a bet.
Thank you. Your comments are most elucidating.

And kudos on x264!
After you figure out that your criteria are too exclusive you should go buy a copy of Crockford's Javascript: The Good Parts. ;)
I downloaded to take a look at the source, they do things that are similar to us actually, and they do have lots of great special case handling that we might use for reference later. One crazy thing that we do that isn't done here is the storage of cookies, we actually temporarily store cookies on the server side so that we can do fancy things with it -- sending around the shopping cart, transfer of shopping state etc.

However, if you've tried using it, you'll notice that it isn't perfect either... they show slashdot.org as an example, but lots of things are broken on it. Most of the javascript stuff doesn't work. Slashdot was a javascript light site a year ago, but now they use tons of fancy javascript like most sites. Their cookie support also seems to be broken -- not sure why. Although I will admit that James did quite a bit of amazing work in just 12k lines of perl code. The perl code is pretty decent too.

It's easy to get a proxy that works on 95% of the code, all the hard stuff is in that last 5% -- that's what we spent most of the time on :-)
Just yesterday, I was watching a pack of Komodo Dragons ... well, eat the corpse of some mammal. It was a video - I didn't see it in real life. But the point is: they weren't eating each other.
Let me guess: The crash occurred slightly before 6 PM on July 22, 2004?
But I only have two criteria. ;)

Does it atleast have the assignments?
Response to Why startups shouldn’t have to pay to pitch angel investors
The evolving face of social networks
SBS in Sydney carries The News Hour with Jim Lehrer and independent radio station carries Democracy Now with Amy Goodman and a few NPR shows .. not to mention the best, most authentic roots reggae show you ever heard!
Ask HN: do you want to enter YC Winter 2010 as part of my team?
I have been thinking about the music industry since 2000 when the RIAA mounted a massive legal challenge against Napster and was eventually significantly altered and sold off by Shawn Fanning.

In 2003 I came up with a website idea and built it using the Xoops CMS, which if it were further developed in a custom manner (and also funded) would've resembled the functionality of MySpace for linking fans with artists, and been more comprehensive.

Right now I am seeking two US-based co-founders who'd like to apply for YC funding 2010. I am now in Israel and plan on being the remote cofounder. First and foremost a technical lead is required.

Potential cofounders may be developers looking for a great project, or existing teams of two or more wanting to (with myself) continue working together in such a manner.

I do not feel overly compelled to enter YC, but feel it would be a great process to maximize the likelihood of real industry change and provide great relevant learning.

I am ready to fill out the entire YC application. What's missing are team mates.

My idea focuses on optimizing gig creation and I have experience in this field... I don't want to say too much. I have registered a couple of domains already.

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html
(this business idea addresses 1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom.)
not too many freely downloadable:

http://www.free-emagazine.com/the-javascript-anthology-101-e...

http://ajaxian.com/archives/eloquent-javascript

--------------------

http://fecklessmind.com/2009/02/09/top-5-javascript-books/

http://www.reddit.com/comments/6y1km/ask_reddit_good_javascr...

usual suspects: Resig. Crockford,
Sales Lead Management Can Lead To Increased Sales
Understand, Prioritize and Interact With the Hottest Sales Leads and Opportunities
A Comparative Study on Open Source Business Intelligence Reporting Technologies