skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think scalability and reliability are mostly orthogonal issues and
should be discussed separately.

Scalability is a farce. In my experience applications are implemented
in such hilariously inefficient ways, because it's hard to see where
the time and especially the IO is spent. But adding more machines is
not a good solution, because it becomes even more difficult to
understand the performance behavior of the system. Also, it transforms
the system into a distributed system and therefore adds a whole new
level of complexity and failure causes. Most websites don't have the
some problems as Google and Amazon.

Optimizing the application could prevent the need for scaling out to
multiple machines. Optimization is not rocket science: Find out the
bottleneck and fix it. Often it is random IO, so either load the data
into RAM or change the algorithm to use sequential IO (e.g. through
batch computation).

Reliability means that the system must work correctly all the time and
there is no way to fix it (e.g. a satellite on a mission). Thus, for
most applications availability, which is the fraction of time a system
works, is a more appropriate metric.

There are two basic strategies for achieving high availability in a
system: perfection and fault-tolerance. Perfection is the default
programming model, which assumes that every hardware and software
component of the system works as expected. Fault-tolerant systems, on
the other hand, are hard and require that the system is designed
around this idea. Also, fault-tolerance makes it harder to change the
system. An often overlooked fact is that for many systems it is
actually much easier to achieve a particular availability goal through
perfection rather than trying to build a more complex fault-tolerant
system.
Make it work. Make it pretty. Make it fast.
Network Behaviour Anomaly Detection & Deep Packet Inspection are two very hot fields with tons of open space for improvement and experimentation. Both of these are extremely general/vague, but just throwing ideas.
There is a time and a place for ad hominem arguments, but this is not it.
Maximum available RAM seems to be limited to 2G on 945 series chipsets that are used with many Atoms.

Just clarifying.
I had no idea e-coli could do that.

Then again, I've been eating a vegan diet for years now so I don't really keep up with meat product dangers..
Why does the fact that he has an opposing view on a given subject make him prejudiced? Is it not possible for someone to hold an opposing view on a subject such as Gay Marriage (or God, or whatever) yet still be perfectly fine with Gay people (or God-loving folk, or whatever)?
collectd can spit out rrd files, and there are tons of rrd graphers out there.

I use drraw... it's really old and boring, but I like it for it's simplistic and I am used to it. (it's just a perl script you run on your web server, no DB needed)
A few excerpts:

- confidential grinding records

- hamburgers made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together

- processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.

- those low-grade ingredients are cut from areas of the cow that are more likely to have had contact with feces
My inability to express my love through marriage is discrimination and denies me my basic constitutional rights.

But that isn't true. Any people can hold any ceremony they want and call themselves anything they want. Find a friendly priest, invite your family and friends to a beach in Maui, hold the ceremony, change your surname, job's a good 'un. Seriously. You can do this. Any gay couple can. The government will not stop you, which is all the Constitution guarantees anyway.

But what you're really referring to is expressing your love through tax breaks and special immigration status. Historically the State offered these perks because it wanted to make it easier for people to make new citizens not because it thought marriage was inherently good. There's a case for heterosexuals who don't intend to have kids not getting these perks either...
PyBrain -- the Python Machine Learning Library
Ask HN: Legality of hosting a subtitles site
I was wondering if somebody can clarify some of the copyright laws involved. Is it legal to host subtitles of translated lines? Is it legal to host subtitles in their original language (containing exactly the lines the actors said, for example)? I was thinking, since synopses of a lot of movies are available on wikipedia, that it would be legal to host something like translated lines, which are not originally written by the copyright owner, but i don't know about the original lines. Thanks :)
How do illegal workers contribute to the problem? I understand that they don't pay income tax, but at their typically low incomes, I'd expect that they wouldn't be paying much tax anyway, and would more likely qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit (i.e. negative income tax) if they were legal.

I'm reminded of the difference between the view of economists on the economic non-problem of immigrants as described by Bryan Caplan:
"Economists are vastly more optimistic about its economic effects than the general public. The Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy asks respondents to say whether “too many immigrants” is a major, minor, or non-reason why the economy is not doing better than it is. 47% of non-economists think it is a major reason; 80% of economists think it is not a reason at all."

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/11/06/bryan-caplan/the-myth...
>there are more slaves than at any time in human history -- 27 million.

Total, clearly.
It doesn't work because of the portfolio effect.

"Reback often tells the story of how a team of IBM patent lawyers went to Sun Microsystems Inc. in the 1980s and claimed that the then start-up was infringing on seven of its patents. After Sun engineers explained why they were not infringing, the IBM lawyers responded that with 10,000 patents, they would be sure to find some infringement somewhere." -- The Washington Post

http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
Interview with Bill Joy 84'
This tragedies make me think that we should make sure to enjoy the life while working on our startups. Life sometimes is just too short.
Ars reader gets free Windows 7 after complaint to Ballmer
So, congresspeople stop worrying about voters once they get elected. The obvious solution is holding elections after congresspeople vote on issues, to determine whose votes will count and who gets thrown out. Too bad it won't be implemented because it's "too big a change".
Translation: Heroku doesn't know how to scale databases.

Meanwhile, out here in the real world, banks, stock exchanges, airlines, telcos, retailers are doing transaction and storage volumes on relational databases that say otherwise.

Also "SQL database" is what the PHB in Dilbert calls 'em. No-one with any experience in the field uses that term.
Disclaimer: IANAL.

Answer: Of course it's probably illegal. A fair use argument could theoretically be made, but I don't think there's been an actual court case over it, so I would put any such argument in the "dubious" category.

But in practice, most publishing companies don't care; in some cases they will even support your actions. The only exception is when the original text is the work in and of itself, such as with translating novels. Legal threats have been thrown around in that case, particularly in the case of American companies licensing foreign works and then threatening fan translators who had been working on translations independently (see the "Support JAST USA's official localizations of Nitro+ games!" fiasco in which many translation groups were sent takedown notices).

That's pretty much the only case in which legal threats fly around period, as such companies view fan translations as a threat to their profits, while the original company who made $movie would love for more people to buy it, regardless of the language in which it is purchased.
Sometimes I really wish Vegans would shut up when the news fundamentally don't matter to them. They are about as relevant as Atheists in a Catholic mess.
You read the article I linked to, right? I can hardly disagree. Nevertheless, after writing code that way for so long and being a very zealous old-school UNIX guy, I guess I'm interested in trying a newer, more conventional way of doing things.
Apparently we can put old stuff on HN again.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690656
Define slave.
I stumbled upon a fellow in a quarry in Northern India who'd been enslaved his entire life. He had assumed that slavery at birth. His grandfather had taken a debt of 62 cents, and three generations and three slave masters later, the principal had not been paid off one bit. The family was illiterate and innumerate. This fellow, who I call Gonoo -- he asked me to protect his identity -- was still forced to work, held through fraud under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence.

My first thought was, "Wow." My second thought was, "I wonder how many people end up in similar (very loose sense of the word) situations based on lending that's occurred in the last 5 years.
Adam Osborne - publishing, portables and paperback software
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859686
"Then again, I've been eating a vegan diet for years now so I don't really keep up with meat product dangers.."

Good thing for you there's never been contamination of any vegetables like spinach...
It's repeated a few times in the interview:

>slaves are those forced to work, held through fraud, under threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence

>TM: To go back to the definition: Forced to work against their will with no escape.

>BS: Held through fraud under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence.
Not really - Bitbucket have gotten quite some of my money.

And yes I am considering chancing that, but mostly because I can't find a good mercurial client for windows.
For anyone wondering about the credibility of this interview, Skinner's book got blurbs from Bill Clinton and Elie Wiesel. http://acrimesomonstrous.com/
Given that Spain don't really have the ability to print money any more due to being a member of the Euro, what do you think will happen?
It is not strictly a meat product danger.

http://www.snopes.com/food/warnings/salad.asp
Great audio lecture from Boyd himself. This one 10 minute video gets right down to the core of the idea in one go.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuY5NcRvBbU&feature=respo...

I can't recommend Discourse on winning and losing, Creation and Destruction and Conceptual spiral more.
you might be interested in this talk about shared editing in Eclipse (using the Eclipse Communication Framework).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfeUCT-tRJQ
It was fixed around 4am (GMT+2) last night, with the assistance of Amazon. I'm just going to summarize what happened here:

We were attacked. Massive UDP DDOS. The flood of traffic prevented us from accessing our EBS store with any acceptable speeds, which is what caused everyone to think the problem was between our EC2 and the EBS. Of course this also explains why booting up a new instance and EBS didn't help anything.

Also, it's happening again now, and we're working with Amazon to remedy it once more.
Ask HN: How much of your personal life did you have to give up for your startup?
Perhaps this shows that I don't want my own business enough, but one of my biggest concerns is that I won't have time to see friends or enjoy any hobbies (or read HN!) any more. Is it really true you end up with zero personal life, and if so, for how long? I understand it varies greatly from founder to founder, but I'm still curious.
How do you (personally) pronounce sudo?
Wikipedia gives three possible pronunciations, but I'm curious about which is actually the most common (I say "sue dough".)
Here is a link to an excerpt from the book in question:
http://www.fastcompany.com/node/45909/print

And a direct quote from the author on the subject of the blog post:

It turns out that having the financial independence to walk away rarely triggers people to do just that. The reality is, making money is such hard work that it changes you. It takes twice as long as anyone plans for. It requires more sacrifices than anyone expects. You become so emotionally invested in that world -- and psychologically adapted to it -- that you don't really want to ditch it.

I met many people who had left the money behind. But having "enough" didn't trigger the change. It had to get personal: Something had to happen such as divorce, the death of a parent, or the recognition that the long hours were hurting one's children. (One man, Don Linn, left investment banking after he came home from a business trip and his two-year-old son didn't recognize him.)
I really hope that Hacker News doesn't become a place were 'Didn't you read the article?' gets a response of 'You must be new here.'
Implement SSH. The world needs a good (free, minimalist, and secure) SSH implementation.
Mb.ideas.repositoru, jQuery components
Pupunzi (Matteo Bicocchi) new web site has been published
Perl has demonstrated itself to be an effective tool for experienced sysadmins to write single-purpose or throwaway scripts, but applications spend most of their lives in maintenance. It it always a false economy to make things difficult for maintenance programmers, even unintentionally.

Pretty much everyone I work with has been burned by being handed some legacy Perl to maintain and as a result we are very reluctant to do any new work with it. The payoff for rewriting in Python is that the technical debt incurred for using Perl in the first place is repaid.
You seriously don't get it. This isn't about the actual ability to marry; it's about the symbolic message it sends.

There _is_ a difference between being gay and straight and this is just one of the many, many ways we're exposed to it. It's just the most poignant one and in many ways it's just low hanging fruit.

This is quite similar to the Civil Rights Movement. Nobody in their right mind would claim that African Americans are getting the same chances today, on average, that Caucasians are getting; but none the less changing the laws meant a great deal.

The same goes for same sex marriages; and we're generally OK with that. At least I am OK with having to struggle for decades and probably centuries before my sexuality is accepted, but it's important to have a feeling of progress, and symbolically speaking the most important step is legalizing gay marriage...
Wouldn't you think that if people hide simple emotions like anger or irritation, that they would hide something far more insidious and serious?
I use "Sue Doo" because it is "As super-user - do this."
I'm just hitting eclipse after a long stint in Visual Studio. Favorite feature so far: hit ctrl+3 to give you a quicksilver-like command line full of useful stuff. The completion is a little finicky, but it's good enough to be useful. Also, Ctrl+Shift+R, I think, lets you open a file by typing in its prefix.
Try this : http://www.opera.com/
CTRL + SHIFT + O : Organize Imports (Finds classes that should be imported, removes excessive imports, etc...probably one of the most justifiable reasons to use an IDE for Java development)

is by far my favourite reason to use Eclipse ^_^
what's the point of your - rather elaborate - reply?
pardon for the inconvenience caused due to copy-pasting the link.
Dan was my friend. And as far as I know, I was the last YC guy to visit Dan and Tom in Boston. And it breaks my heart. It just breaks it in a million pieces for a million reasons.

Dan was generous, and kind, and smart in the way that we all hope to be. He was the kind of person that would stand in front of a group of powerful venture capitalists and say "we don't need your money." He was a true inspiration.

We lost one of us and we lost one of our best. Please, please take the time to reach out to everyone you know who feels lonely or alone and let them know you care. God knows I wish I had. I wish I had realized.

And if you knew Dan, please take some time to say "fuck you" to the powers that be. He'd smile.

We will miss you dearly.
One year ago, I met Dan when we were applying to Y-Combinator. We were contemplating entering YC, and reached out to Dan for advice. After a few conversations, we were convinced.

Part of our decision to join YC was because of the community, and this was in no small measure influenced by our experiences with Dan. Since then, we have kept in touch, sharing ideas and war stories.

Dan played a brief but influential role in the Airbnb story, and an even greater influence in my life as one of the warmest introductions to the startup community one could ever imagine.
The expansion of the middle class has nothing to do with the top tax bracket. It has to do with industrialization before automation (lots of low/medium skill jobs that provided significant value), and the destruction of competition around the world.
>> "it's about the symbolic message it sends."

eg trying to convince society that you're right and they're wrong.

Why waste so much time trying to convince people that don't agree with you, and likely never will.

Why do you need everyone to accept your sexuality? Why care? As long as the people you care about are fine with it, why does it matter?

Legalizing gay marriage won't make a blind bit of difference to peoples attitudes and beliefs. In fact, it'll probably make them hold their position even more strongly.
Truly Tragic. I didn't know him. Rest in Peace, Dan.
Breast Augmentation
Enlargement of the breasts. Augmentation of the breast typically consists of insertion of a silicone bag under the breast or under the breast and chest muscle and then filling the bag with saline.
"... You know how an iceberg is 90% underwater? Well, most software is like that too -- there's a pretty user interface that takes about 10% of the work, and then 90% of the programming work is under the covers. And if you take into account the fact that about half of your time is spent fixing bugs, the UI only takes 5% of the work. And if you limit yourself to the visual part of the UI, the pixels, what you would see in PowerPoint, now we're talking less than 1%. That's not the secret. The secret is that People Who Aren't Programmers Do Not Understand This. ..."

An old article but important to understand.
I really don't understand what you're arguing against here.

> Thus slavery in the United States is now illegal, severely increasing the costs and the risks of operating a human trafficking enterprise. That's all that we really can do.<

No, there's quite a lot more we can do. Foreign policy is all about influencing what goes on beyond your own borders.

> I see plenty of things wrong here. Is that $40K USD? Is that $40K USD in today's money or in the value of the dollar in 1850? What does it cost to make a living in Haiti? How far will $100 or $50 US go?

The word "equivalent" in the original article is clearly meant to convey that it's $40k in today's money. (as would even a tiny amount of knowledge of economic history, surely?)

I don't know how far $50 will go on the average Haitian salary, but surely part of his point is that in this case there is a population (visiting American tourists) for whom $50 is disposable income. It was never the case for historic US slavery that the price of a slave was anything less than an investment.

(And slave importation may not be the end goal. Maybe you just want a slave for two weeks while you enjoy your holiday. Is that less reprehensible?)

> Places like India have grown in population since the time of slavery in the United States. I would really like to see numbers based on % of population for these countries rather than raw numbers (and historical percentages for comparison, obviously)

Well, yes, comparative numbers would be interesting. (and I'm fairly sure nobody would be surprised to learn that there is less slavery per head of population than previously - but does that make it any less bad?)

I don't think human misery works on the calculus you're trying to apply. One million people in slavery are going to be fairly unhappy, whether they're embedded in a population of 50 million or 5 billion. If the number of people in slavery is increasing, that's bad, even if it's going down as a percentage.

> Do you really think that any US President is going to wipe out all slavery world-wide within a single term through only foreign policy decisions? Do you even believe that it's possible in the short-term without some sort of war/bloodshed?

Do you really think that's what he's asking for? Do you really think an appropriate alternative is just to shrug your shoulders, put it in historical context and do nothing?

Do you really think that if something can't be fixed immediately, or its fix isn't immediately obvious, we should just not bother thinking about it?
http://www.globalideasbank.org/site/bank/index.php
I think you need to distinguish between the religious/cultural definition of marriage, and the legal definition.

I agree that we can't force priests to marry in the name of their God, because that's a matter of faith. That decision should be made by each individual church.

But it is also not fair to impose our cultural definitions on others when it comes to legal status. It seems strange that we give non-christian marriages the same status, while homosexuals in the same situation are treated differently.

It is also false that the definition of a marriage is the same in the "first world". Other countries have managed to separate the religious definition of marriage from the legal definition.

I'm not gay, and I have to admit that I look another way when two men kiss. But that doesn't mean I don't respect their situation, and want to give them the same rights as myself.
Is there anything Amazon could have done to prevent this (or at least made diagnosing it easier), or is it a problem with your particular application?
> Paying a bit extra tax/insurance is hardly in the same category as what Turing had to endure with chemical castration etc.

That there exist other people who are worse off than you doesn't mean that you're treated fairly, or that you shouldn't try to do something about it.

> I'm discriminated against because I didn't go to a posh school. Because I'm not a woman. Because I wear glasses. Because I'm not big+muscular. Because I don't know any famous people.

You can change some things about you: work out, wear contact lenses, etc. You can't change your sex (or you probably wouldn't want to), so you can try to change your environment. This is the situation he's in.
'more convenient' often means far more trouble in the long run.

I've seen colleagues use their IDE build process which is completely broken, and spend a day trying to figure out what's wrong... (Never use a build process in an IDE).
You see people blindly creating source files that are thousands of lines long and not noticing since their IDE folds the code etc. The IDE hides the bloat. Which is a terrible thing.

When you start trying to integrate svn, build process, etc into an IDE, everything goes wrong.

The 'intelligence' in textmate was even too much for me. Inserting "" when I pressed it once, trying to do code indenting. It still drives me mad how it handles tab and spaces (When I press delete, I want it to remove one space. Not 4).

I really don't think an IDE is 'more conventional'. Perhaps in corporate cubeville.
Guys, all this discussions about gay and straight right are abit pathetic.
As a gay guy, I would like to get the social security no more. I don't need additional benefits, you know, my personal life is only my business.
Yes, all people should have the same right and opportunitis. But in our world many people hates minority, and we know about reverse discremenation.

You know, this discussion will not help to change something. It will not give the same immigration right that straight family have. It will not change "don't ask, don't tell" army politics.

If to be honest, all this income stuff isn't a big problem for homosexual people (this is only my view point, but i'm only doctoral student). There are much more important problems, that should be solved as fast as possible