skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
true. what i meant was that my off-the-cuff physics radar did not automatically think this was impossible. i used a gas as an example, but solids can also be restructured into different volumes and shapes. for example, diamonds, charcoal and graphite. i'm no doubt missing the precise definition of the math problem...i was just responding from my practical layman perspective.
True, but the reason Amazon created EBS is that on EC2 local instance storage is transient, so they needed something nonvolatile but lower-level than S3. Cloud Server's local storage is already nonvolatile and RAID-1'd.

/works for Rackspace
No they are not! My colleague is Mr "Can't Do". Where the rest of us see opportunity and "cool" he sees problems. He has put his job on the line for us many times over telling the CEO to curb his dreams and enthusiasm and ship something that works first. Incidentally, he has been .NET/PHP corporate programming guy and never ventured outside reporting and billing software.

Today he is our rockstar. Every time the rest of us are getting ahead of ourselves we turn to him for feedback and if he is even marginally un-pissed-off by our ideas, we know we're doing the right thing.

If it wasn't for him, nothing would have shipped and none of us would still be on the project, since 3 of us are dyed-in-the-wool technophiles (hello? 2 Lispers and a game developer?)
Totally agree with you here. However, most of the large companies have TOS that explicitly say they are not responsible for your data. That is where I think there needs to be a Bill of Rights for data. If you pay for a service, there should be some level of guarantee that they will at least try... and remove those clauses in their TOS.
If you enjoy being passive-agressive, then I suppose the answer is yes.

My point was more along the lines of saying "don't think that just because a blog post says you're a free electron, that you're going to automatically get job offers lining up for you." You should get jobs because you are a good match for them.

If you currently feel micromanaged, you're better off hitting the problem head-on. Either find out why you're getting micromanaged and correct it, or find a new job.
Have you written in anything from the ML family? I strongly recommend you take a look at OCaml or Haskell. I believe you will find that static typing, when done right, is immensely helpful.
The best way to prevent data loss is to put your data on a public server and have google index it. Google's cache is awesome and yes I have used this before :)
And Stan Wagon's book "The Banach-Tarski paradox" is outstandingly good. (But intended for mathematicians; look before you buy.)
vim: Recursively load all java files (i.e. in all subdirectories):

:args **/*.java

Refactor a package name throughout the project ("e" suppresses the "No match" error message):

:argdo %s/oldpackage/newpackage/e
This is just one of the reasons I use http://lifestreambackup.com/ to make my own back ups of data in online services.
I'd feel like I was missing out on something. My take is that it's simply a hair over engineered for the level of expressiveness most musicians will be able to play with. Build the same thing at a lower fidelity, sell it at 1/4 the price and maybe it'll take off. Right now, it's the price of really high end traditional instruments. And the next step down is a 10 penny whistle.
I'm having difficulty seeing the value in this idea. It seems that Plurchase is going to be relying heavily on retailers to make this idea succeed. But, if I'm Zappos, Amazon, or any other online retailer, I don't want Plurchase -- or any other service -- hijacking my website via their own proxy, for any reason, and/or redefining my customer's experiences in any way.

And when the Plurchase team approaches online retailers and gives them ten reasons why allowing Plurchase to do this will ultimately help the retailer make more money, they are going to be met with a wall of skepticism, and rightly so.

It's always easy to rationalize how your ideas (that primarily benefit you) will benefit others too, but actually getting other people to agree with your passion and sign on with your business model is an entirely different story.

My 2 cents!
Please don't use sports as analogy to economics, politics or anything else, unless there is direct connection. Thank you.
Perhaps creative works should simply fall into the public domain after n years has passed?

Yes, perhaps we need something like copyright that expires... what's that? It does? Granting copyright monopoly "for a limited time" is in the US constitution? Interesting... let me give Disney a ring.
There is nothing "in-process" about MVC. I can access ActiveRecord objects just as easily from an IRB as from a Rails action, and I can drive a REST API just fine from curl. He's simply crazy.
working less still means you think about work, which distracts from thinking about other things.
There was a time where RealPlayer was better than Windows Media Player. I switched to the Mac and stopped using both before I found out if that ever changed.
"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it."

-- Linus Torvalds
I have not idea why they embedded the commercial, but did not even link to hulu: http://www.hulu.com/watch/101471/the-tonight-show-with-conan...
I use sqlpython.
That Conan (a) felt like Ajay would be relevant for a general audience, and (b) didn't bring him on for the sole purpose of humiliating him speaks well for the acceptance of engineering in US society. A decade ago, he would have been reduced to caricature -- "nerd" glasses and the like.
It does look incomplete, but I would like to see a decent resource on game programming for the non-game developer. I consider myself a fairly competent developer but I'm pretty clueless when it comes to AI programming and game development.
Earn More Profits With Wholesale Products
Cleaning up erlang_markdown
I call this weekend.
It's funny. I saw this on Boing Boing earlier today, and I thought to myself, "you know one of the things I like about Hacker News is that this wouldn't rate a place on the front page on Hacker News".
If you don't get it because you know nothing about set theory, unfortunately, the answer is to learn some about set theory or the notation will just go over your head.

If you don't get it because you are trying to visualize what the five pieces would look like, you can stop trying. It's not possible to visualize. Nobody knows what they "look" like, because there is no known algorithm to construct the five pieces. There is merely a proof that they exist, and that they are infinitely complicated little pieces. If you get everything before that, and you get everything after that, you actually get everything. The Axiom of Choice is basically the official mathematician version of "And magic happens here...". (I'm being glib, it's better characterized than that, but there's a large kernel of truth there.)

(I'm not "against" the Axiom of Choice, but I think it should always be clear when it is necessary, as I think the division between "proofs that might mean something in the real world" and "not" is a division worth keeping track of, even if mathematicians aren't supposed to care about such mundane matters.)
They bought the last-place Smartphone vendor in order to kill it? They can get last place just by introducing their own product.
I'm not sure how much is a tech feature or un-walled policy would solve the problem. I think it would fractionally minimize it. The current psychological barrier -- people not using a phone as a computer and its imperfections is profound.

Before, if a phone didn't work, it was one of a few things, usually the device or the carrier. Now, it's one of a dozen dozen or more products and services. People couldn't export before. They might be able to now.

A friend of mine once noted the subtle difference between how technology can protect you from failure, but a backup can help protect you from yourself.

It feels like we're moving towards a singularity. Expectations, responsibility and technology.
I've seen people "back up" NetApp SANs before to prepare for upgrades; I don't think it's generally accepted practice to just say "fuck it, we'll do it live!"

They don't use "big tapes". They plan a disaster recovery architecture and (in the cases I've been involved with) use block streaming protocols to mirror data. Granted, I didn't do the backups, but I'm pretty sure they didn't pay us to bust up those streaming protocols so they could not use them.
They used the word "magnitude", which seems like the closest they could probably come to "clusterfuck" without the wording itself being legally actionable.
I haven't used Amazon myself, but a good friend of mine has done quite a bit with it. When I asked him about it, he said (IIRC) that one thing to be aware of what that you couldn't run a MySQL DB on one of their small instances--you needed a large instance. So, something to keep in mind.

(Please do verify this--I may have misremembered or the facts may have changed since I heard this.)
"Sounds like a Commodore 64 tune."

It's hard to know whether it really sounds like that or not. The media was fairly heavily compressed to the point where the human voices were obviously heavily distorted, let alone the output of the instrument itself. An actual-factual violin would hardly have fared better.

If anyone knows where to get much higher fidelity recordings I'd be interested, though I'd expect it "just" sounds like a high-end synthesizer.
What I don't understand is why Intel didn't use the real Ajay in their ads. Here's someone who they are supposedly honoring as a rock star, and yet when it comes to the ads, instead of using him, they hire an actor. How big of an Intel star can you be, if you aren't good enough to appear on TV?
How much money do you think an Intel Fellow makes over the course of their career? There are 46 of them. I'm guessing Ajay's just fine with how this played out.
No need to sensationalize, he's still around: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sah

Codepad is meant for simple snippets. I don't see anything wrong with the versions that he's currently providing.
Signing up for a third-party hosted Subversion account. The prices are so low these days, there's no need to manage the SVN server on your own. I tend to use SVN more now that I don't have to worry about managing it.

The sharing features of Google Docs has also been a big time saver.
Yeah, things have gotten worse lately, and up 'till about the last week, I was an ardent defender of "everything's just fine." C'est la vie.

I think one small part of the problem is that you can never be hurt by having a bad submission, and there's a risk of payoff, so why not submit something. Then, once it's here, even a few clicks can get front page payoff.
Ask HN/PG: What does the name Y Combinator mean?
Why the name "YCombinator?
I found it odd that he didn't share the credit with more people at Intel and its partners, and spoke negatively about Firewire[1].

[1]- Firewire lost mainly because the cheaper+slower USB1.1 became ubiquitous first, and then came the backward-compatible (in connectors/cables) and comparably-fast USB2.0.
When I read how he "programmed" a dumb Python script in college I immediately thought he must have just graduated in the last few years.
Why not execute on your idea, get users, then contact a company that you think could also copy your idea and strike a partnership/advertising arrangement with them?
Thanks for the hulu link. The embedded control did not work for me despite repeated refreshes. The hulu link did.
See also http://www.scriptlets.org/.

Similar idea, but implemented on top of AppEngine and opensource. Designed to give you persistent URLs to run your code so you can use them as webhooks, etc.
Yes, I'm sure he's doing quite well, although I don't think it's a given that he measures his success by the size of his paycheck.

As far as a positive portrayal of an engineer -- I think it kind of undercuts the message to have an actor take his place in the commercial.
Yes, my assumption is there are many more programmers that code at home (whatever it means) than there are good programmers.

In this case as I've shown "coding at home" doesn't have sufficient predictive power to be used as a quick test of being good at programming.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_point_combinator
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+14%3A13-...

Now, quick: what happened to the 2 little fishies?
That's odd, I just learned about the Baader-Meinhof pehnomenon the other day, and here it is coming up again. Bizarre.
From talking to him recently in person, he's just super busy with his startup, which is taking off: http://saucelabs.com/
If "leverage" was defined (it's a technical, non-dictionary, meaning), and examples given, the hypothesis could be tested against each instance.

- Financially, leverage means debt; more capital means you can do more.

- Hiring people increases leverage.

- Automating tasks increases leverage: whether it be windmill or bash script.

- "Buy (or use open source, or reuse) not build" increases leverage.

- Working smarter not harder, in general, increases leverage.

From these examples. I see that the author meant leverage that depends on other people. The last three examples depend only on self-reliance, so you can do them right now. There's no perversity law for them.
Incidentally, there's a "Muphry's Law" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
Fast Cars and Mullet Wigs: How I Won The Maverick Business Adventure
Corporate is very unresponsive to feedback, and I'm starting to see runs in the fabric.

My 'old' Panera in north San Diego county was amazing. You almost felt justified paying their higher prices because the atmosphere was welcoming, the 'vibe' was friendly, and it was a Starbucks-like 'third place' better than Starbucks.

My 'new' Panera hasn't seen me but twice since I moved to San Gabriel Valley. The manager that's usually there is short and you feel like you're an interruption to...whatever it is they would rather be doing. I stopped going after getting the exact same treatment the second time. I e-mailed their corporate offices with specific compliments / criticisms, and never heard a word. I want to be their customer, because they have a few sandwiches I like. But now I just go to the local Italian deli and get food that's as good with a much better price tag.

And, just in case it was the fault of one GM: I've been back to my old Panera, and they're suffering many of the same problems. It feels like the problem that Gateway and Dell have both faced: initial high-quality, high-value, high-attention environments can easily degrade over time.
Working with special-needs kids with soccer every Saturday.
Windows environment:

Ditto clipboard manager/history. This helps both in avoiding context changes (alt-tabbing back and forth, etc.) and in retrieving older items. Quite configurable.

Winsplit Revolution window size/position manager. Put windows where you want them with a single chord. Quickly get windows e.g. side by side, without having to mouse around.

ToDoList list/project management. Hierarchical lists with priorities and many other identifiers, as well as full text comments. Gets items and relationships down quickly and without a lot of kerfuffle.

Paper and pen environment:

Original notes in black ink or pencil. Post meeting / follow up notes (e.g. fleshing out what was originally noted more briefly) in blue ink. Items of particular concern in red ink or marked up with red ink. Occasional, judicious application of a highlight marker.

A digital camera to quickly capture or to provide a quick copy of items of particular interest, written, printed, or otherwise (great for capturing the state of a whiteboard).
Wow, that seems kind of extreme. We have both "adults don't program in their free time" and "programming in your free time is possibly obsessive compulsive" in this thread.

If passion is a good thing to have, how do you measure it other than with a question like this? And what would be a good way to measure unhealthy dedication to a hobby that could be obsessive compulsive?
All multimedia websites in Arabic stream crap in Real, except for al-Jazeera.
Lots of guns and canned food. Works equally well for zombie outbreaks and post-nuclear apocalypses too.
Worked well for a simple ruby sample [1]. I haven't tried anything complicated though.

[1]http://codepad.org/HMPcd6Hk
Yeah. You'd think that a day spent shooting a commercial wouldn't be a horrible inconvenience given the value. After all, CEOs often put themselves in front of the camera. Perhaps the real Ajay wasn't deemed nerdy enough?
Reminds me of the Foundation series -- the 1st foundation miniaturized nuclear powered devices.
Exactly. What terrible software. In fact, I remember this one time that...

(buffering..................)
1000 nodes are nothing if you crawl the entire web and keep a history. I'm sure someone already has a modified version of an OSS bigtable cluster at 1PB+ and close to 1k nodes :)

>> they don't support range scan efficiently either
> Cassandra does.

Only if you call order preserving hashing efficient when all the keys can be easily hashed in to one bucket, no matter what hash function you choose :) Cassandra's range query is an occasionally useful hack, which is not comparable to Bigtable like implementations, in terms of efficiency, scalability and robustness.

The Bigtable's single-master with standbys is never a problem in practice. The AppEngine outage was a due to a bug in GFS master protocol decoding. If this bug is in every node, all nodes would be crashing instead of one with some service (reads and some writes) still available. The so called "fully" distributed model is only better when you assume that you don't have bugs in your code and that node failure is random. I argue that separating different responsibilities/functionalities into different components is good for fault isolation, a sound software engineering practice. Naive fully distributed model is much more brittle in practice due to code bugs.

BTW, although Hypertable is inspired by Bigtable in design, the implementation and features set (support a dozen languages via Thrift and full read isolation via MVCC) are different enough that I wouldn't call it a clone :)
Bullet Impacts at 1,000,000 fps
http://ycombinator.com/faq.html

Why did you choose the name "Y Combinator?"

The Y combinator is one of the coolest ideas in computer science. It's also a metaphor for what we do. It's a program that runs programs; we're a company that helps start companies.
If your tasks don't require looking at a lot of images or color, nocturne for mac is another good tool.
Yay for Kohana on Hacker News!
I always heard it was some marbles. Hmm.
What's the difference between wealth and value?
Ya think they can't shut it down now?
From a NYT article on Intel:

The real inventors are not in the ads; they are played by actors. Mr. Bell said he wanted to ensure the commercials were humorous, and avoid arguments with Intel employees over which should be featured.

"When you are required politically to cast certain people and get everyone involved, you tend to get this watered-down, feel-good campaign that works really well internally and makes the company itself feel good," but does not appeal to consumers, he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/business/media/06adco.html
Youtube video: direct link... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfDoQwIAaXg

The watermarked website is a wreck.

More than just bullet impacts. At around 2:00 I think it is showing a BB sized object hitting a bullet from a perpendicular trajectory. At around 3:00 there is some nice bullet into bulletproof glass action. 5:50 has shockwave formation in liquids.

Back of envelope calculations suggest that most of this is at less than 1,000,000 frames per second, but the slowest of the slow might be at a million.
Ugh. As someone still carrying a shrapnel in his leg, I hope none of you come to experience it. I didn't feel it at first, the sound scared more more, but when I saw my leg I could taste bitter metal in my mouth. I was 10 years old :-(
MS Word already has a comprehensive scripting extension system, it's called Visual Basic for Applications. It's been in there since at least Office 2000. It gives you programmatic access to nearly everything in the application you're scripting.
Wow, are we really that dominated by the startup culture here? You can't think of a single situation where correctness is more important than speed?

I've spent most of my career working on systems handling money, at jobs where we actually bought and sold things. When there are bugs in the code, we lose real, quantifiable money. Sometimes being first-to-market with a product or feature is more valuable than the cost of bugs. Sometime a buggy feature makes more money than it loses. But, it's not a given, and it's naive to say that speed is more important than correctness in all (or even most) situations.
This: "Most of the credit cards she had were maxed out by 2004. She would sometimes just let the bills pile up and not pay the minimum."

..then this: "Last fall, wanting to buy gifts for her mother and sister and clothes for a young niece, she applied for credit and was rejected at Macy's and Dress Barn, finally getting a card with a $250 limit at the Children's Place." is what's called living beyond your means. Credit != free money.
I do this mainly to keep me from sitting in one spot for too long - and getting sore wrists, back, etc. Drinking green tea and water for me forces me to go to the bathroom at regular intervals.
Optimising compilers are there so that you can be a better programmer
Is software design a luxury?
Ask HN: Why cloud computing?
For hosting your apps, why go on the cloud? Is scalability the only reason. It seems so much more expensive.
There are BBs, lead .144 (.22?) wadcutter pellets and what appears to be bird shot as well. It also looks like some of the shots were through rather unconventional media... like ice, perhaps. I enjoyed it.
5:50 looks like ballistic gel.

From 0:00 to 9:59 the video is awesome.
Read HN a little less often - serious here. I am trying to read news (I feel like I am addict sometimes) a little less these days. Productivity gains are obvious and my time is sliced up less.
This:

"When a utility to which she owed $300 offered to settle for less, Ms. King says, she declined, because she was told an overdue bill takes longer to come off a person's credit report when it is settled for a partial payment."

Probably has something to do with this:

"she lost the shoe-store job in January, and then learned that a prospective new employer had rejected her after running a credit check. Fearing that her credit record would trip her up again and again, she resolved to fix her financial mess." and other bits and pieces like it.

I wonder if this kind of heightened awareness of credit scores, service to help people repair them, using them as a proxy for other things and such invalidates credit scores as a measure of creditworthiness.

What happens if the "market" suddenly loses faith in the idea of credit scores as a measure of default risk?
So, do you consider kids "little things" or "tools"?

Such a utilitarian view of children.
We take financial education for granted, but many in the bottom tier have no understanding of monetary management. They jump on the opportunity to spend the money because they lack the simplest comprehension of financial obligation and a balanced budget. This isn't to say their actions are valid, but rather to emphasize the dire need for financial education amongst our youth.
Depends on what you mean with 'The Cloud' and 'apps'.

Hosting something 24/7 on for example Amazon's EC2 is barely cost effective. On the other hand doing regular hosting combined with EC2 for peaks is extremely cost effective.
Even better is employing a cleaner. 3 hours a week makes a huge difference for me. Even if you were only earning the same after tax as what you pay the cleaner it's worth it. I'd much rather work than clean.