skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Semantics pedantry: all of the algorithms he presented are random distributions. They're just not uniformly random. In colloquial speech, "random" implies "uniformly random," but I think we should be precise when we're actually talking about pseudo-random number generators and probability distributions.
There is a cost to providing Internet access in rural areas. Should this cost be borne by the people who choose to live in those places, or by everybody else?

Has there ever been a time when making everybody pay for an individual's mistakes -- whether the mistake is getting pregnant at 15 or buying AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities -- has been the right thing to do?
The fact that they can absorb 100% of microwave radiation is interesting, it would be very interesting if the could turn it into electrical current instead of heat.
Aoc08
Tool of the Day: Better Browsing with iWeavr
oh please do! risqer [ @ ] gmail
Is EA Going to Buy Zynga or Playfish in Social Gaming Bid?
Is freedom of speech a positive right or a negative right, in that sense?
Thanks for the tip, but I was looking for a solution that would allow me to reuse contrib.auth and contrib.admin apps.

Please vote here for an AppEngine native Django support: http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_thre...
While I agree that "positive rights" frequently amount to legally mandated wealth transfer, saying your neighbors must "work as slaves" is a bit extreme. A slave has no choice as to whether they work, what they work on, and how they work.

Personally, I have no problem with the fact that property rights are not absolute (taxation and regulation being the primary inroads). That limitation of the property right results in much that I think is good.
#  how i can use the setProfiling() in the rianmysql
Apparently they needed to discuss money before getting married. What a horrible attitude.
The key to understanding negative or positive rights is that it is seen from the point of view of the government.

Freedom of speech is a negative right as it specifically disallows the government from censoring you.
A Finnish friend of mine told me: Article forgot to mention that every household will be taxed for around 175€/year; known as TV/Internet Tax. Independently if TV or Internet is used in that household…
The secrets of Google's design team
Making everyone pay makes sense when doing nothing ends up costing society more.
Typical way that competent developers end up with technical debt:

1. Customer/user/consumer has a vague idea of what they need but doesn't know how to express it.

2. Developer works with customer to learn their business and understand their requirements.

3. Developer throws together a prototype to confirm that he understands the problem.

4. Customer sees that developer is on the right track. If these 9 enhancements are done, then we'll really have something.

5. Developer quickly adds 9 enhancements to prototype.

6. Customer loves it! Move it to production so we can play with it for a while.

7. While customer plays with it, developer maps out a plan to architect, refactor, and scale the prototype to be "production worthy".

8. Developer is pulled away to 5 other urgent projects.

9. Customer continues to use prototype as production software.

10. Two years later: "Who wrote this shit?"

Which quadrant does that fit into?
I (jgrahamc) am looking for a JavaScript guru in the Bay Area
Clojure is a lisp, but not an implementation of Common Lisp.
You have a point there, so the cost is shared by the people who live in rural areas (by paying relative higher rates for less bandwidth) and by the service provider, and therefore by all customers. Also there has been some discussions about how goverment could invest to the infrastructure and take some of the costs.

Anyway I think this is good since it can actually save some money in the long run. We already have many goverment services that you can use over the internet which saves taxpayers' money and makes everyone's life more productive.
Will that be the only charge then, or is this in addition to the operator/ISP charges?
Because Apple has decided it is part of their image to be 'green' and a consequence of that is that they cannot use things like halogen-containing SSD's. Apple doesn't consist of hippies; they have a brand name to uphold. It's a trade-off and calling that 'retarded' means you completely missed their rational reasons for not using halogen-containing SSD's.
You could reduce the costs by probably getting some cheap acco via AirBnb.com or hooking up with other attendees.

On the flip side, think of the potential of some awesome networking that you could do. ultimately, i think no one else can make that call for you, but I'd definitely spend way less on food / transport / acco.
Such 'orchestrated' startup events tend to be populated with consultants, accountants and lawyers who want your business

Ummm... Startup school is a bit different. It's pretty much all geeks who are neck deep in their own startups, or soon will be.
Can a nation thrive with all citizens living in urban areas? The internet is becoming the main way to disseminate information. I'd rather folks in rural areas have access to broadband.

Libraries and broadband access are important to providing education opportunities and to spread culture and ideas throughout a nation, and I'm willing to subsidize that for people living in rural areas.
Freedom of speech is basically an extension of property rights. You didn't violate anyones right just by saying something controversial, so they can't punish you for it.

And you can run your own blog or hope a newspaper will publish what you write. But imagine there was government legislation giving a "right" for people to have something published in the newspapers against the will of the newspapers. That would violate the rights of the newspapers. That would be a positive right: "Everyone has the right to have their writings published in big newspapers." for instance.

Freedom of speech doesn't mean others should provide the paper, bandwidth and so on. You have to provide that stuff yourself and/or in corporate with others.
Inevitable. What will really be interesting is when they're older and realize that instant access to all human knowledge is a basic human right, and launch satellites (or finally get mesh networks working right) for truly ubiquitous internet.
er, what about the second experiment, where light exercise reduced infection to 12% versus 50% for no exercise and 70% for 5x as much exercise?

that seems to suggest that doing a little bit of work keeps the body healthy.

furthermore, the study doesn't say what the mice did before the experiement. perhaps the mice were used to 20-30 minutes of exercise a day, and it is change that is most damaging. what one mice considers exhausting, another mouse might find boring.

edit: the article mentions "(Although definitions of intense exercise vary among researchers, most define it as a workout or race of an hour or more during which your heart rate and respiration soar and you feel as if you are working hard.)"
Positive rights are obligations on society to give you stuff.

Negative rights are obligations on society to not interfere with you doing something.

Freedom of speech, of religion, all forms of freedom of creed and expression are negative rights: it is incumbent upon society to not interfere with you doing these things as you please (within limits that are not harmful to others).

Even the right to keep and bear arms (USA) is a negative right: it constitutes an obligation on the government not to take your guns away, not access to free guns.
Very awesome, thank you for the link!
Hm. It seems like a tricky distinction. What about the 6th amendment? It seems like that gives me the positive right to a trial by jury.

The viewpoint seems to be the reverse of how rights are expressed in the bill of rights, where they're all described from the point of view of the 'end user'.

[edit: many, not all in the bill of rights]
Good work/life balance earns companies more
The distinction between so-called "positive" and "negative" rights is wholly artificial. For example, the public works department is not allowed to go park a truck in front of your driveway, making it useless. Is the phone company allowed to place a filter on your line, so that you don't get DSL? Is the authors' guild allowed to place guards outside the public library to keep you out? Is the post office allowed to stop checking your mailbox? Note that, if you're in the U.S, all these infrastructures were paid for by your tax dollars.

The only difference is that the status quo is different. It's a purely historical artifact that the phone company has control over your phone line. Should we really be deciding who should control which pieces of infrastructure by looking at historical artifacts?

Now, none of this stops us from debating the merits of this particular infrastructure project. In this case, we should probably compare it to a library system or post office, as it serves similar functions.
Seeking Co-Founder for BigTweet and Social.com
Great! I showed your website to a climbing geek in my office and he got very excited about it. He's the kind of person who just can't shut up about climbing. I've stopped asking him what he did on the weekend or on holiday because the answer's the same every time. It would be great if you could connect with such people and leverage their passion.
You need the slashes. Otherwise how do you differentiate between:
site:port/file (example.com:8080/myfile.htm)
and
protocol:site/file (http:example.com/myfile.htm)
?
You could guess, based on where the full stops are, what's a numeric, etc. But you wouldn't be sure. Having dots for one separator, slashes for another and a double slash for the third makes it entirely clear where the breaks are.
pretty funny until i got to #6. your use of "pussy-whipped" in this case is demeaning to both the man and the woman, and didn't fit with the rest of the comment's tone.
You do have a good point, but I do not think either ArsTechnica or the poster here was intentionally setting up linkbait. Viewing the title on their front page (where they italicize key words and include a slightly longer blurb) it is clearly being ironic, and I think the poster was just following the tradition here of using the original tighter.
As the article mentions, it would be very foolish business wise for Mr. Dell to say otherwise.

However, netbooks serve two important niches: people who want ultra-portables and people who want really cheap computers to do basic tasks. Those two sets can and do overlap somewhat.

For the latter group, one can argue that a really cheap notebook(or older desktop) would work as well as netbook.

As for me, the ultra-portability is the aspect that appeals the most. I remember paying ridiculous money for Toshiba Libretto P75 a long time ago.

More extreme portability(iPhone, N900, etc) are nice, but they are not running x86.
FWIW and per Google and CMU retrospectives, the vendor-published MTBF rates appear very optimistic, about 36% of large HDD populations failed with no SMART data logged, and only about half of impending HDD failures were reasonably predicted by SMART. I'd expect the predictive values of various of the SMART data points to be (very) different with SSD, too.

Until we get a population of these SSDs in the field and better studied, then we'll have a better idea of the failure rates, and whether SMART needs to be considered or reconsidered.
Pop quiz: what % of the first 10 amendments guarantee positive rights?
I can't tell you whether you should go or not, but I can say what I got out of the last startup school.

I met a number of great people at the last startup school, several of whom I interact with regularly one and a half years later. One person I met almost became my cofounder this fall, and still might later on.

I got to meet a number of users from Hacker News, and put names to faces. That was awesome.

I got to meet PG, and I talked with Trevor for a while about his robot. That was very cool.

I started the Hackers and Founders meetup ( www.hackersandfounders.com ) at last years startup school for people like yourself to get together and hang out and talk before the conference. Since then, it's taken on a life of it's own, and it's grown to a membership of 400+ people, and we routinely have 20-25 people getting together at a bar to talk our startups and shiny new technologies every other week. It's a good time, and there's some good connections to be made.

Would I do it again even if I had to pay $2k for airfare, room and board? Yes. but, YMMV. A large part of the benefit that I derived from starting hackers and founders is because I had recently relocated to Silicon Valley. It may not be as beneficial for you.
I'm under the impression that current USB connections can not move data as fast as SATA links.
You're right, sorry. I was having so much fun I got carried away. I'd edit it, but it's too late now.
several years ago, i took a class from prof tibshirani using this book and was absolutely blown away. if you don't have a deep stats background (as i didn't), you might find it scarily dense, but wow there's some good stuff in there.
I have done a lot of experimenting with RAM disks

Can you go into a bit of detail? How do you do that?
I wonder if the crabs would rather be temporarily numbered or permanently eaten?
It's actually known as Media Tax, which is revamped version of the old TV/Radio Tax, where TV owners had to pay about 225€/year.

The tax is used for funding the Finnish Broadcasting Company(YLE) and the tv-infrastructure. Most people opposed the tax, since not everyone watch TV anymore and they're not happy how it's used, for example buying HBO shows and producing soap operas instead of some quality programs like BBC does.
Wikipedia of maps is called Wikimapia.
It really doesn't. For example, try the URL http://paulgraham.com://articles.html
A service where some woman (who isn’t under 25 or very well dressed herself) plays “queer eye” for a dude over webcam and demeans him into buying her choice of clothes.

At first I thought this referred to one of those "financial domination" sites where you pay to be humiliated and ignored by some girl over the internet. Now that's entrepreneurship, American style!
I was completely oblivious to the // being a problem at all. Since it isn't necessary for >99% of non-geeky url usage, it only comes up once, when I explain that browsers are pretty smart and that part is optional with a couple of exceptions... and that is it.

Weird.
I think the Vertex is the one I put in my desktop machine. Absolutely love it. Need to upgrade my MBP to an SSD in the near future.
During the part about the Harley and the gold band it is worded almost as if those purchases happened recently. I don't think they did; I think they happened before the downgrade when they thought times were good because it later says the Harley sat for months before a buyer was found - so it's sold off now. The house and kids situation is similar as well. Obviously the kids all happened prior to this situation when they felt they were moving up in the world. You can't just un-have kids when things get tough later! The house deal sounded like it was in progress when the downgrade came. Now they're effectively trapped there. You can't just sell a house immediately after buying and expect to break even - they'd likely end up taking a loss selling the house (especially if the real estate market there is still dropping). (Of course it's important to consider if the loss of selling now offsets the loss of paying a higher mortgage payment while you wait for things to recover.) If they had canceled the in-progress house deal at the last minute, they'd probably have been liable for some fees or perhaps even a lawsuit from the seller. (I've lived in my house just over 2 years and will be selling it soon due to a job and location change and we'll be lucky to even break even - and we paid a lot extra on principal each month while the times were good!)

EDIT: I missed that the house they bought was actually his parents! Deals with family screws with people's sense of priorities, for sure.. :)
I can't speak for cake, but I suspect it's as much an aesthetic thing as anything. Example from art: if you were insistent on viewing the Mona Lisa from a cubist aesthetic, it would be a crummy painting. It's not a moral assertion as such, though.
LOL, you just described the way that Rails first makes it into a lot of large organizations. Luckily, if you follow Rails conventions you should be pretty close to "production worthy" at step 6.

As for step 10, it's the rare system that doesn't suffer that two years into production.
Serious question, not being facetious:

> ... I'm willing to subsidize that for people living in rural areas.

I'm not willing to do that. What are you willing to do to me for refusing? Arrest me? Shoot me?
I have an OCZ SSD in my desktop machine and I can agree with you, the biggest noticeable difference to me is in moving and deleting large files.

I can't remember the last time I had to wait on a file to do the whole moving/copying/deleting dialog.
Thanks for pointing me to MT. I looked at it a bit, and it seems promising. It looks like it stores everything in a database, and generates the static files from that. How do you deal with a major site update? Would you copy the database to the dev machine, do the update, and then have some SQL magic to merge in only the parts that have changed? (Since you can't copy it back, as then you'd lose all the forum posts since the copy-to-dev)
A high-stress job requiring lots of travel -- I would hope that she didn't marry him thinking he'd do that forever, for $34K.
Patrick, I really liked your point about IP - we create it, and we know it can be scaled or replicated easily, but because many of our clients (you with teachers, me with SME business owners) live in a scarcity space, the value they perceive is much higher.
Their reporting on SSD technology has been excellent and comprehensive. They should win some kind of excellence in tech journalism award.
In reading the article, the quotes from the wife herself seemed to be pretty positive about her husband's handling of the situation. I didn't get the impression from her quotes that she thought it was the end of the world that she'd have to keep working, either. I don't know where the husband gets this idea - maybe it's something he's made up in his head? Or perhaps she was just being polite and didn't talk smack about him to the reporter and yet he talked smack about her. Either way, I guess, it's a pretty stupid situation. :)
I guess one could have chosen another separator than ":" as port number prefix so there would be no ambiguity with the protocol suffix :)
As Facebook Nears 100M U.S. Visitors, Twitter Falls Further Behind
I can't think of any other software that is as hated as IE. Anyone?

If I could ask for 2 wishes to comes true:

1) Eliminate IE
2) World peace
I'm worried about that. What can I do to prevent that?
I also used this book for a data mining class that I took about two years ago. The book is very thorough but the math can be dense. We didn't actually end up using it in class very much, but it was a good reference book for the topics it contains.
Slightly offtopic, Bloomberg just bought Business Week for a song: roughly 2-5 million. It will be interesting to see what changes happen at the magazine.

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/FineOnMedia/archives/20...

Personally, I always found BW too bland, compared to Forbes.
Tekzilla just had a good interview with Anand on SSD.
http://revision3.com/tekzilla/visback/is-it-time-to-go-ssd-a...
I remember seeing a talk about this at ILC this year. It sort of has the feeling of "one guy in his spare time" (with random parts written by his students), whereas ABCL seems to have some sort of community (and plan) behind it.

Just my impression, as I would use SBCL for any real work.
I'm concerned by the fact that he allows himself to go to such a place without applying the precept "Leave no trace". In my opinion if you want to preserve wild areas like this one, it is very important to respect it no matter what.

You would find it charming but I would find it sad. We don't know who else might visit this area and by what frequency, just by respect for other people who may not be pleased by such a gesture and because he doesn't own the place he shouln'd have done that. It really seems just like a basic outdoor camping rule to me.
The Four P's: Two forgotten principles of Software Design
It's the best. Here's a chart showing how much faster it is than anything else at random reads: http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/storage/Intel/34nmSSD/Re...

I've put the same disk in my MacBook Pro. Strongly recommended.
I think the issue is not so much that they exist, the issue is that they profit greatly from content created by others without paying said others a single penny.
This is completely absurd. People should not be given rights that require someone provide something for them. Surely, the problem with believing someone has a 'right' to broadband internet access they should also have a right to a computer, or a television, or cable.
If you've still got them, I'd welcome an invite. mcherm@mcherm.com. Thanks.
Michael Dell dings Netbooks
In many cases heavy raids is an overkill. just a hardware mirror + replication on slow backup servers could be a tradeof.
I agree. It's been what I would call lip service to agile, but that's about it.

My experience with agile has been that most managers who seek to lead agile teams wind up equating rapidly typing code to rapidly developing software.
I recommend experimenting to figure out what works best for you.

My personal experience matches:

http://www.runnersworld.com/article/0,7120,s6-241-285--12386...

IMO the studies cited there mirror the results with the mice, so the best bet is to run the 30-75 minutes recommended in the Runner's World article, not several hours as used in the experiments.

R.I.P. mice.
using "price gouging" adds nothing to the statement that prices are high except a sense of outrage

Of course it does. It says:

1. the subject is a retail product with a standard price, as opposed to a market product where the price is determined by bids and asks.

2. the price is temporarily higher than the standard price due to some sort of unforeseen disruption.

3. the price will return to the standard price when circumstances return to normal.

In the present example the product that Jeff says costs $600 will cost $450 within 3 months. Just as it cost $450 for a brief moment 1.5 months ago.

Edit: Also, you are speaking for yourself about the outrage. I certainly don't have any outrage. Not does "price gouging" give me any sense of outrage.

The people who are outraged by the practice will be outraged by it no matter what you call it. And people, like myself, who have no problem with it will have no problem with it no matter what you call it.
Tax you.
Seattle Nerd Dinner w/ Ben Scheirman
Is the fact that internet access is not required that much of a benefit? Why not spend $199 on an iPod Touch instead...
It was a joke from our summer session. There was a lot of annoyance over the domain even then. I didn't expect many people to get it.
Take A Trip into the Future on the Electronic Superhighway (1993)
Why I Don’t Like Board Observers
Yes please! fatclownintown@gmail.com
I can't really see how I'd get anything out of something like that.

You might not. But do you see the value of, say, therapy for other people? If so, then.. it's like that, just for less touchy-feely stuff ;-)
Coming from an extremely poor family, I feel fortunate to have been raised in a society that provided the "positive right" to a public education; otherwise I would probably be unemployed or making minimum wage in a gas station right now.