skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Today was great, thanks to Tom, Fenn and Ned for organising. Hope there's another in the not too distant future.
1. Sometimes articles rub me the wrong way, and I feel a strong compulsion to 'go on the record' refuting the problems I see or 'complaining' (for lack of a better word) about the issues with the article.

2. I channel that into a comment here because I found the article through Hacker News

3. I feel my comments could generate discussion. I could be completely wrong/off-base in my thought process, hopelessly naive on a topic or completely mis-informed.

4. I also enjoy the Hacker News/YC community here, and I feel that by pointing out these things that irk me (or adding additional commentary to some of the points that the article makes) I will enrich the community. I guess I should note that I'm not just pointing out grammatical errors or complaining because 'beg the question' wasn't used correctly.
But I do get it. Marriage means different things to different institutions. To the couple themselves, it's about love. For the Church, it's about God's will. For the government, it's about a steady supply of new citizens. For most of history - perhaps even still - a single woman with a young child is not a viable economic unit. A couple is.

The third point is the one that's being contended here. All the legal aspects of marriage - tax, immigration, inheritance, etc - were put in place by the government in support of the government's interest in marriage. If there are no kids involved, it's not at all clear why the government should offer the perks.

As for the other points, the first I have already addressed and the second is only relevant if you really want to get married in a church, and like I say, you can hold the ceremony on a beach if you want to.
The article overstates CA's response to its problems. The slashing and "vast numbers" aren't enough to right the ship and are pretty minimal compared to private industry, or even other state governments. The response of state employees and their unions to furloughs (walkouts, infighting, demands for still higher taxes) demonstrate seriousness hasn't set in.

Booms and busts define the state, long before the housing or internet bubbles, there was the gold rush, the oil boom, the space race, the PC revolution, you name it. There's always another boom to cover the last bust—this time, too. That boom and bust mentality extends to radical political solutions that become problematic in themselves, like the initiative process, super-majority rules, and prop. 13. The state pretty much is the guy described in the Lisp thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859669

Maybe it's in our interest to be the world's hypomanic dreamscape? If so, the feds and everyone else can bail us out, like they do the rest of the nation's problem children (banks, farmers, automakers, savings and loans, tire makers, steel producers, railroads…), leave us to our booms and busts, enjoy the gravy when times are good and let us live in their basement strumming our guitar when we screw the pooch.

But, Uncle Sam's not much better off. He's just running on a slower pace. Long enough in his basement and he'll start to see how alike we really are—right around the time he gets foreclosed on. Our federal system has a seriously great architectural basis, but it's an 18th and 19th century design burdened with two centuries of gnarly patches and tweaks hacked together in two-year bursts by groups of 535 glad-handers and administered by a nameless, faceless, unrepresentative bureaucracy. As the nation scaled-up, the exquisite balance of republic and democracy struck by the founders turned into an opaque, incomprehensible, unfair, inefficient, ineffective cancer. Some major refactoring needs to be done. CA, having the same issues, will serve as a proving-ground for reforming the whole country. If it doesn't work out, well there's always another boom after the bust.
Breast Cancer and Bone Metastasis
In other words, different definitions from what was used in the past. Need a common definition for a meaningful comparison.
Do not jump to conclusions.
I guess I avoid some of these pitfalls because I wrote C and Perl with vi for 10 years, and used a relatively spartan FVWM environment consisting solely of terminals and command-line approaches to all problems.

That method of approaching programming and technical work isn't going to change for me even if I forklift-upgrade my Java text editor to something a little fancier, which is essentially what I see myself to have done here.

I can't use an integrated build process anyway because I'm working on a backend server process that necessarily must reside on a remote machine; there'd be virtually no point in trying to develop or run it locally, as it depends on connectivity to too many other resources for any aspect of its functionality. So, I mount the source directory over SSHFS or NFS and edit it "locally" with Eclipse, but the build process is remote and done via a manually crafted Ant build file.

I haven't seen Eclipse fold any code other than the big comment block at the top of every source file.

I wouldn't be opposed to integrating SVN awareness into it, but find it a bit problematic since I'm using SVN over SSH.
JOnAS 5.1 (JEE Application Server) released
Touching, indeed.

I see this pattern all around me and a lot of it in myself - and, mind you, I only use Lisp to teach Emacs new tricks. The fact worse is better in this industry is a tragedy so huge we have not yet come to appreciate its magnitude.
It's been hard for them since their planet was destroyed by time-traveling Romulans.
Search Is About People, Not Just Data: Google's Udi Manber
Sure, I am not against working harder, just against the simplistic "work harder". Also I still think it is a management problem and breaks are important.
"Sue dough". For a long time I didn't realize it was an abbreviation for "super-user do", and by the time I did "sue dough" was stuck in my head.
Nielsen, Facebook In Strategic Alliance To Help Marketers
The comparison isn't important, it's a title meant to draw attention. Bikeshed, etc.
How Do You Learn How?
Why is the image of the globe at the top right of the page Fack to Bront?
Book recommendation: Ignore Everybody
Yea, but there were complaints there that the link was in the body of the post and not submitted 'properly'
I've just rolled out of bed in a mid-Sunday-afternoon and this article is a bit like a slap in the face. I want to be a writer, and some people who are both likely to know and unlikely to mislead me have said I have a reasonable shot at making my living that way, based on what they've seen.

But for the last five years I've been working in a Giant Corporation, where the money is good and the prospects are good and my parents are delighted that I'm 'doing so well', and it has proved _immensely_ difficult for me to walk away. Our bonuses are paid in March, and every year I say to myself: next March I'm done. That's it. I've been distracted long enough. And every year I don't :-(

Sigh. Who knew chasing your dreams would be difficult?
For the record my recollections of how aircraft landing gear works seem to be inaccurate (I just looked, could only find a reference for steerable gear on the B-52). For the spin-up idea I did find this though:

http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/17808/Pre-Spin-Airplane-Whe...
We're talking UDP flood here, saturating our bandwidth. It never reached our servers, it just ate all the bandwidth on our connection. I guess what Amazon could have done is be quicker in spotting the DDOS and take measures to prevent it.
Symptoms of mild anxiety attack
Anxiety attacks can be difficult to deal with. The physical symptoms of an anxiety attack may be treated from a medical point of view, people still need to address the cause of the anxiety attack. Anxiety Attacks provides detailed information on symptoms of mild anxiety attack, Causes of Anxiety Attacks, anxiety attack symptoms and more.
http://www.colourlovers.com/ is a great place to start. Loads of color pallets and textures.
Wrong on both counts, so now what ?

A nice example from California, a little bit north of LA (where I've lived for three months at the expense of one of my customers) there is an area with lots of really really fancy houses. They must be worth upwards of several million $ a piece.

The driveways are absolutely immaculate, the road they empty out on is worse than some of the roads in Northern Canada. I've seen the exact same thing in countries that literally qualify as third world.

I refer you to this map:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_world_country

In case you don't know what is meant by the term, but Colombia and Panama definitely qualify. By 'modern' standards some parts of Romania and eastern Poland do too, but I've been to plenty of other places that would count, either by that map or because of the local conditions. And I'm not talking package holidays here but stays of at least several months.

I'm using these roads as an example because at the time it struck me as indicative of what might be wrong there.

If your country is 'the richest in the world' by some measurements then that wealth should be translated to an increased higher standard of living for the poorest, and an increase in infrastructural spending that will benefit everyone, not just the rich.

If you can't manage that, in other words if your poor are still not provided health care, proper housing and education and if you have an underclass that basically has very few choices of making parity with those born into richer families (and hey, isn't that what that famous American dream is all about) as well as an enormous criminal problem then maybe we should propose redrawing that wikipedia map along more objective criteria.

And quite possibly, we'll find that California has much more in common with third world countries than with the first, no matter how rich the rich, and no matter how much the GDP.

Northern Canada is a good comparison because it probably has the lowest GDP per surface unit of any country in the world, but they also have one of the best health care systems, and their work on roads is nothing short of amazing, especially if you take in to account the effect of the climate on the roads there.

If everybody in California (including corporations) would be paying taxes relative compared to other 'first world' countries then such things would be taken for granted.

Until it is solved through taxation everybody, VCs included (who really are only in the game to turn a ton of money in to even more money) has a responsibility to look after their neighbours.
Yes it's interesting. Yes it compares Oracle and MySQL.

For balance it would be helpful to have an analysis from a more independent source than Oracle.
Without those illegal immigrants / undocumented workers the economy would collapse completely.
If your question is about the legality of something, for god's sake, ASK A LAWYER.

Seriously.

And, by the way, if you have a medical condition, don't ask random strangers about that, either-- ask a doctor.
I feel like I want to see all of the numbers, and when numbers are pushed off to the side, it feels very deceptive to me.

There is definitely some funkiness going on with the numbers here, but I'd point out a few things.

1) In an interview like this, you wouldn't really expect to get the full set of numbers.

2) There is a theory that you need to grossly overstate a problem for anyone to do anything about it. In general, I think this is true, most people don't respond to "half a percent of the world's population is in slavery" even though this is an absurdly high percent (assuming you agree with his definition).

Overall I agree with you that having more numbers would be informative, I just don't think that the lack of numbers in this article is representative of anything.

My argument is that you can't compare the price of a slave in the 1800's to the price of a slave now and use the severe difference in price as proof that the people of the 1800's put a higher-value on human life.

Sure, but the point is that moderately rich people can now go somewhere and acquire slaves and have no need to even treat them so well as to give them a place to live and some minimum amount of food since if you lose one, another one isn't too expensive.
Presumably when he is doing his comparison he is using a common definition.
True. Without the stigma, you could call it getting help.
I think you're falling prey to having limited knowledge about a field and then expanding on that knowledge thinking that what you think must be new because you didn't know it before.

Probably the best course of action if you want to advance the field of AI is to first get current with the the field, then start thinking up new stuff, preferably in concert with other people in the field to keep you on the right track. It's rare that an outsider with limited knowledge of a field can suddenly make some fairly obvious contribution that those in the field had overlooked.
"This isn't about the actual ability to marry; it's about the symbolic message it sends."

You're conceding too much. Of course this is about the actual ability for gay people to marry.

This is not only about the ability for gay people to get married -- it's about the ability of gay people to marry, to adopt children, to file taxes jointly, to visit each other in the hospital when sick, take medical power of attorney, and all of the hundreds of other benefits that straight couples take for granted. The US Constitution doesn't guarantee any of those benefits to straight people, either. The "it's not in the US Constitution" argument against equal marriage rights is so transparently specious that no self-respecting high school debater would bother making it. Same goes for the argument that "any people can hold any ceremony they want". The name of the institution isn't what's important; the societal benefits of the institution are what's important.

The parent can wax poetic on his theories for why the state makes marriage a legal institution, and whether they should do so, but it doesn't matter a bit. At the end of the day, marriage is a legal structure, that fact isn't changing, and the argument remains that there's no compelling reason that homosexuals shouldn't expect the same legal protections offered to straight couples.
Ask HN: Does MySql/Postgresql + Ruby/Python/Groovy solve 80% of IT problems?
There is much talk of scaling, noSql and functional languages. I wonder if we are just looking at shining new things and not being pragmatists.

Does MySql/Postgresql coupled with dynamically typed languages (Ruby/Python/Groovy) solve 80% of IT problems?
"it's just brain chemistry, that it's just "all in their head"

I don't think that is true in general, except in the most trivial sense (that everything is just chemistry).

Maybe there are some diseases where the chemistry is disturbed and it makes you feel depressed. But there are a lot of "natural" causes for depression, too.
A lot of subtitles are extracted from DVDs and Blu-rays in theory content owners could claim copyright.
Facebook down for some people in Pakistan
I'm glad this was reposted because it links into something I've working on for a while. I'm on what must be the ninth rewrite now, but have had a breakthrough on a long-term problem this weekend (notation).

In the past I've noticed that organisations run into trouble when they have one schema with multiple apps off it, because schema changes become difficult. I'm trying to write an engine that contains application business logic without polluting it with user interface considerations. It aims to solve a problem for which many people currently use stored procedures. However, with a better syntax and being stateful it should be far more effective at enclosing the schema and supporting rapid changes. The dynamic of interacting with the application is a bit like a MUD, in that each session can only do things that are exposed to it via the 'room' mechanism.

I had intended that its mainstay backend would be relational databases. But I now realise - if I'm building business logic into this layer (which will be the single point-of-entry into the schema) the datastore can afford to be a lot less complex than a traditional relational db.

My focus this weekend, to 'prove' the new design, is a tool that wraps a generic-webapp-framework-style CRUD app around a schema on the fly. So if you're on crud screen rendered for the "person" table then there'll be an organisation-foreign-key datapoint in the generated user interface. It will be either a radio button list, dropdowns or search interface depending on the number of records.

How do map/reduce programmers manage the structural integrity of their schemas without the sort of foreign key protections that you get with relational databases? Is there an analogue to the ORM layer that they use for this?
more info from PreCentral.net: http://www.precentral.net/rumor-webos-121-delayed-will-fix-i...

"Why isn't iTunes sync the cause of the delay? Because so far it's taken very little of Palm's resources to keep it up and running, says the tipster:

* Time it took for Palm Developers to re-enable iTunes sync for webOS 1.1: about five minutes (they just had to change the Vendor ID, after all)

* Time it took for Palm Developers to re-enable iTunes sync for webOS 1.2.1: just shy of two and a half hours (we'll be extremely curious to see if this is true and how they did it)

* Time it will take the next time (and there will be a next time): totally unclear, but Palm is committed to keep doing it until that time estimate gets to be something over a 40 man-hours or so.

Is it worth it for Palm to keep up these iTunes shenanigans? Apparently so far it's not taxing the company much and they're hoping that their loyal users will place blame for the situation on Apple."
They are about as relevant as Atheists in a Catholic mess.

Freudian slip?
Spain's public debt is not so bad compared to it's other neighbors - France, Portugal and Morocco all have almost twice as much. Spain's problem is mainly with the private debt...

Anyway, as you mentioned Eurozone, PIGS countries (Portugal-Ireland-Greece-Spain) are obviously a major burden with their problems.

But what will happen will depend on what actions will be taken. Personally I'm quite pessimistic about Europe.

Here's a detailed analysis of the situation from Roubini Global Economics Monitor http://www.rgemonitor.com/euro-monitor/255424/do_brics_and_g...
I don't see any indication that Eric Ries himself is attempting such a thing. It seems like a cover-your-ass move on the part of the group originator (Rich Collins).
Hold on there. The world is not perfect and that is exactly the reason why we need people like you, who understand what it means to pass through hardship, to fight back for justice and for human dignity. Hardship will end and your experience will allow you to help other people to also fight back for their humanity. "What does not kill me, makes me stronger." - Nietzsche.
Umm...analyzing self...Beep...Beep...Beep...Panic...Panic...Panic...... I have all the characteristics for a BBM, from top to bottom. Whats worse?I dont even ,know lisp!!!!!What do I do what do I do????!!!!!!!!1
It doesn't really matter if it's legal (thought it probably isn't) if it's going to piss off the copyright holders, they'll come after you anyway.
I too pronounce it Sue Doo, but because first time I read it this was what I made of the word
It's interesting -- I know at least six people who triumphed when their part-time side project took off. I don't know anyone who made enough money, and then switched to the thing they claimed to really wanted to do.

Obviously there are limits. Plenty of students work short-term jobs they don't like to pay for a vacation. But that's not the same kind of investment one makes in a career.
I use zabbix over ~<1000 physical and virtual hosts for historical resource usage and alerting.

Cacti for network traffic monitoring (and alerting using thold plugin).

Smokeping for network latency and availability monitoring and alerting.
I think the most important excerpt from the article:

- slaughterhouses and grinders are resisting testing their ingredients for E. coli, because it costs too much

- they also blacklist customers who do their own testing

- U.S.D.A., the federal agency regulating the industry, is not requiring proper testing, instead they issue recommendations the large companies mostly ignore

- U.S.D.A has not imposed any type of sanctions for food safety violations regarding E. coli outbreaks at facilities dealing with ground beef
By the time you run out of steam on a fair sized server with a few slave nodes thrown in you're ticking over at 1M uniques daily, with some work you can stretch that quite a bit further (sharding).

Of course this depends on how much of a load your average user generates.

The database is a bottleneck, sure. But usually you hit other roadblocks on the way up that are a lot harder to solve than how to make your database scale.

To put it in very pragmatic terms, on the web there are currently 1,000 companies with more than 1M uniques daily, if you're going to be one of the lucky 1,000 then you will haver a scaling problem some day. But that scaling problem will be a relatively minor problem, plenty of people have solved that and documented it.

Going noSql is one of the ways of getting around that but there are several ways of achieving that.
Nobody has a reasonable shot at making their living writing, including the most talented writers. You do it for other reasons and find ways to sustain yourself on the side.

If you've managed to put off your dream for five years, then you need to ask yourself whether this is really your life's goal.
Techcrunch is stupid. I will just read 1 tweet at a time.
No, because these things are not "solutions." They are technologies. You apply the right technology to the right situation. It is true that there are technology fads, but the fad technologies are often linked to growing awareness within the industry about the concepts they employ.

For example:

C++ -> Class-based object orientation

Java -> Virtual machines

Rails -> Web frameworks

NoSQL -> Scalability strategies

Erlang, Haskell -> Concurrency strategies

So really, the appropriate way to ask this question is, "are these concepts enough to solve 80% of IT problems?" Once the concepts are available to the mainstream, switching the specific technology is not a huge problem.

It's true that in the process of taking on fads, people tend to lose their way and become zealots, getting stuck on one concept as the end-all be-all, but that's true of most human topics.

I would venture to guess that at this point in time we're actually seeing a whole explosion of concepts thrust into the mainstream from many directions - some aged and well-known to academia, and others the result of front-line efforts.
I beg to differ that no one transitions out of the practical job after finding financial security. This is essentially retirement. They key is not letting one's social fulfillment and income be tied to a single source. (And not growing old before walking away.)
This is the same guy who tried to get people to sign up for a $3K/month discussion circle about how to be lean:

http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/introducing-lea...

Off the top of my head, one excellent strategy for avoiding distractions and process bloat is to avoid this kind of navel-gazing and just work on your project.

You can PayPal me the $3k at your convenience.
Suicide is one of those things that I don't think we can ever reconcile in our minds. ... You do learn to find a quiet place for the feelings

I second this. A close friend killed herself 15 years ago, and I still think of her, probably at least once a month, and mourn her, and wonder what her life would be like if she were still alive. But that remembrance comes from a quiet place, certainly much quieter than in the months surrounding the event. It doesn't stop, but it does change.

My condolences to all affected by this loss.