skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are people (who keep this stuff confidential) to talk to though. You have to pay them and it can be difficult to find one that just doesn't want to blame the past instead of helping you move forward. But these people do exist and are helpful. I suggest finding someone who knows something about cognitive behavioral therapy.

I agree with a sibling comment here that it is vital to talk through these things. If you can't trust your friends, first find someone else to talk to and then find some new friends.
$3 per month just shows how little money it would take to change the game -- compare that to how much extra we are paying in taxes to pay for unnecessary expenditures.

It's $36 per year -- people could donate more -- you can donate up to $2,000 per candidate per election. And $3 per month is to outspend all contributions and all lobbying expenditures combined -- you could spend much less to be an influential player.
If you're in Melbourne Australia, you should come join us at today's YC meetup
The original post for this event is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=849668

It feels rather frivoulous given the terrible news of the passing of Dan Haubert, so I hope that amongst the joviality, we can spare a thought for Dan's family and friends and reflect a little on the menace that is depression.

The weather in Melbourne is fabulous and we're expecting a turnout of at least 30-40 people.

The hashtag for today is ycmelb - http://search.twitter.com/search?q=ycmelb. Should be plenty of tweets and pics through the afternoon.

I'm heading in now...
According to this article it does: http://magazine.redhat.com/2007/09/27/a-guide-to-gnu-screen/

It says that I need to be able to run:

chmod u+s /usr/bin/screen
chmod 755 /var/run/screen

Is there a way to bypass that or do I have to install screen in my home directory? I'd like to limit the amount of crap I have to install in ~/. They hardly allow any space on these campus machines.
That's only an illusion. The more you grow, the more you should delegate and free up your time for the high value issues - I mean that in real money terms.
That's exactly why businesses like Amazon that are concerned with both scale and availability are using non-relational databases that replace ACID with "eventual consistency" or other weakened/modified guarantees. Then you can have active-active replication while increasing (rather than decreasing) reliability in the presence of node failures and network partitions.
It would be funny if it wasn't possibly quite true.
This is a non-partisan effort, and people can submit whatever issues they want addressed -- then the community votes on them. It is not driven by a political agenda other than to combat corporate lobbyists.

We are leveraging previous social waves to enable people to take action, to do something about the problems, rather than being relegated to spectators in the political game. And they can do it from the comfort of their homes as they watch the issues debated on the news.
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Actually their previous "fix" spoofed Apple's vendor id..

The current update also spoofs some additional fields. See: http://www.precentral.net/how-palm-re-enabled-itunes-901-syn...
The Cybersecurity Myth
That could happen. As it stands right now, we're losing the battle to corporate lobbyists, and we don't have many tools in place to do anything about it. This is about creating a tool to deal with the situation. It gives people the opportunity to take action -- but you can't force them to act.
Ok, point taken, I wasn't aware of the distinction between patents and trademarks.

But my point is, don't you find it at all absurd that Eric Ries is trying to own the term "Lean Startup"? It strikes me as being a little ridiculous.
That's how MoveOn works - it lets its community members vote on issues that it will prioritize in its campaigns and lobbying.
The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (an oldie but a goodie)
I did get that. What I didn't get was why it only showed the relevant svn commands, not how to do the same thing in git for all the items listed (ie: for "Find all authors"; format of an authors file? a link to git's docs? or how about recommending a specific module for "Show all externals"? or, again, a link to where to start looking for one?)
Hopefully this means he'll be funny again.
Blah blah blah

Hyperlocal is the most awful buzzword I've ever seen. Out of all of them, ever.

I was just reading some "Hyperlocal" news in a paper printed often enough that I see a new one each time I pick up dinner from the same restaurant. Just because "The Observer" isn't online with ajax 5.7 pushed heavily by a startup into a first round blah blah blah

The market is tapped already and anyone who cares is already getting their news. No one younger than 55 gives a shit about hyperlocal.
I don't think anyone's doubting the $3/month figure - most people could spare that. It's the "getting 100% of registered voters to participate" part that has many people thinking you're overreaching slightly.

For the most part, the people that currently donate to political organizations will keep donating to those same organizations - they're happy with them, they voluntarily chose to donate to them, and they will need a lot of convincing to move their donor-dollars. So you're going to need to get people who don't currently donate money for political purposes to join your effort, and have their money used to pay for corporate lobbyists. How?
This article is relevant here, I think...

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Paul Graham and Mike Moritz discuss Funding
I usually buy off of amazon. Since most of my classes are technical in nature now, I usually end up keeping them for future reference.
"... A Terrible Tragedy ..."

I'm pretty p$ssed off with this. Why?

I didn't know Dan but I do remember his ideas. I also remember a picture from ticketstumbler. It took a while to equate "Dan" with "fallentimes".

Firstly it's the sheer bloody waste. The waste of youth, the talent and opportunity. Then there is the betrayal. Betrayal in the sense of abandoning of those who cared, family, friends. It took a bit of time for me to accept "tragedy" as the correct phrase to use here? Tragedy for me is/was reserved for people killed, because they had no other opportunity, no other choice. I've had plenty of time to reflect on "tragedy" this year. I've been to more funeral services this year than I care for and I'll be working on the fallout for years to come ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/collections/7215762118... So I can empathise with the situation. I really can.

But I now realise the passing of Dan is just as tragic in the true Greek sense for other reasons. It's a tragedy because of all the choices Dan made he chose the one that will do the most damage to himself, his family and friends. It's a tragedy because of the waste of youth, talent and opportunity. Dan's gift to me is he re-enforces the idea of "be good", "try your best", "have fun" but gain some perspective of what really matters. I know this is hard in Startups and in youth. Perspective comes with time.

Remember this when you fail, when you succeed. Don't let the trivial get on top of you, lest you let others down, more than yourself.
"By the time your site is that big, hopefully you've split your software into independent services, each with its own (relatively) small database. And for the services that do need a distributed cache or persistence layer, there's now a huge body of literature and software that solves those problems."

Yes, yes, a thousand times, yes. We seem to be slowly moving toward this ideal at JTV as we grow, because scaling monolithic database architectures is a pain, and it isn't reliable. Even if you scale your database via replication or sharding, you've still got a global choke point for reliability and performance. If your database(s) get slow, if replications lag, if a server dies or whatever, there's a good chance it will take down your whole site. On the other hand, if you use services, you can lose individual features without taking down everything.

I would go so far as to say that it's probably a good idea to build a service-oriented architecture from the start. It's only a bit harder to do, it keeps your code base cleaner and more orthogonal over time, and it makes scaling much easier, should the need ever arise.
Move on is partisan (progressive) organization, and they accept donations in a traditional way (https://pol.moveon.org/donate/donate.html). They have an "Action Forum," which is a discussion forum where people can post ideas, but I don't believe you can contribute micropayments toward specific issues.
Collectd is great. High resolution data collection, reliable, low resource usage. We wrote our own rrd graphs against it.
"... smart people because they don't make decisions based on brand, but rather they make decisions based on research. ..."

Is this counter-intuitive with Mac purchases?
That's only applicable to applications that does not require ACID. I've seen architectures where sharding + active-passive replication was used to provide scalability without sacrificing reliability (ACID-compliance).

here's an interesting paper on sharding with Oracle vs. Mysql

http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/availability/pdf/ora...
Darn it, missed that one.

You're right. Facebook is now a real business. I'll be curious to see what the eventual ROI is for their investors.
He most certainly was; thank you! He was always the one person who couldn't be phased. I still don't know how it came to this.
Seems like a popular theme right now -- one of the github guys is working on a cassandra git backend at http://github.com/schacon/agitmemnon, and paul querna of ASF infrastructure is looking at doing the same for svn.
Will California become America's first failed state?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/04/california-failing-state-debt

i dont live in US, i wonder how a place like california got into such mess.
Well, it's both. Rackspace Cloud Servers (basically, Slicehost post-acquisition) has an EC2-like api to spin up and down servers on demand, billed by the hour.
The startup I work for sells a product called "Load Monitor" (I know, real dynamic name) that provides application-centric, comprehensive monitoring (including cross-host rollup) with both a real time dashboard and historical access to collected data. Probably overkill if you only have a few servers, but it's nice if you have a few 1000: http://www.librato.com/products/load_monitor
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i'm going to agree with this. i don't do a whole lot of typing on my iphone, because i use it mostly for content consumption, rather than creation. but when i do need to type on it, i don't find that to be a problem.

i especially like how it can have a whole bunch of different keyboards: one optimized for url entry, one for general text, one for phone numbers, one for japanese, and so on. a hardware keyboard feels obsolete the second it's produced, which is the same way i feel about paper printouts these days.
Works for me. (I know I am a total sellout or whatever, but I actually registered for nytimes.com and stay logged in. This means I can view any article any time, without playing around with cookies or referer hacks.)
It depends on the training data. Here is a dataset of Congressional Voting Records.
http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Congressional+Voting+...

I can think of a few algorithms that could be used to classify this data and possibly predict outcomes.
"... No one younger than 55 gives a shit about hyperlocal. ..."

maybe (Adrian Holovaty) but it is having an impact ~ http://www.holovaty.com/writing/everyblock-acquisition/
And look what that got them, the traffic that bing receives is just about equal to the gain that google made since bings launch [1].

Maybe it's too early to write them off, but I would have expected a better showing by now. It's a real pity because I would have liked to see some real competition in the search field.

[1] figures from 'alexa', take with grain of salt etc.
You're switching definitions of "meaningful."
It's pretty easy add your own graphs, you just write a simple command line program that outputs the data you wish to graph in a simple textual format.
I agree with you, but I think if you discriminate by referrer you're just playing games, so it's fair to play games in return.

What will happen is that someone clicks on an article through google, they'll post it here and then everybody else runs smack into the paywall.
Sharding isn't scaling. It's not application-transparent, and it's an operational nightmare.
That is an excellent point about optimized keyboards.
You don't have to get 100% of registered voters to participate. For one thing, if someone gives more than $3 then that means you need less people to contribute.

But more importantly, the top corporate donor is AT&T (http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/index.php) -- if you click on AT&T's name, you will see that AT&T contributed $4.5 million total in 2008. At $3 per month, that's only 125,366 users.

The $3 per month per registered voter is to outspend all contributors and all lobby expenditures combined -- including what individuals gave. You don't need to raise that much to be an influential player.
A couple of days ago there was a statement here by someone claiming that California got 1/3 of the worlds venture capital, it looks like that could be spent better than on the 'next hot thing' on the web. Unbelievable, what a scene.
The CAP theorem is a very strong limit on providing both availability and consistency in any distributed system. In your sharding+replication example, what happens when the datacenters containing your master and slave lose their network link? There's no way you can maintain write availability for clients in both datacenters while also providing the ACID Consistency guarantee. (But systems like Dynamo or CouchDB can do so while guaranteeing eventual consistency.)

After seeing some real-world, big business problems solved with weakened consistency guarentees, I'm skeptical that there are as many problems that "need" ACID as most people think. Rather, I think that (a) most engineers have not yet been exposed to the reasonable alternatives to ACID, and so have not actually thought about whether they "need" it, and (b) most businesses do not yet have the knowledge they need to weigh ACID's benefits against its availability costs.
There's a ton of projects, none of which is truly easy to deploy, all of which kinda suck, and all of which store data as RRDs (which is the worst possible solution except for all the others, as the saying goes).

This is an area that could use some new blood, but apparently the existing solutions work barely well enough.
> The article suggests that the workaround took ~40 hours.

Actually, this is a reference to Palm saying they will continue making the Pre sync with iTunes until a fix would take more than 40 hours to implement. They said the last fix took just a few minutes, and I'm sure this one took about the same amount of time (add one more line of code to change the Manufacturer ID in addition to the Vendor ID when media sync is selected).
A friend of mine just mentioned this to me tonight. The costs can be really insidious in unexpected ways.

My state is now offering insurance benefits to domestic partners, but the amount that the state covers for insurance (for example) is now taxable income. That means paying taxes on several thousand dollars that they never actually see.

However you feel about religious issues, or how "marriage" should be defined, It's kind of absurd that a certain segment of state employees doing equal work get shorted on benefits for their household.
Pretty massive I would expect. They're either setting themselves up to be the ideal bride for Google or Microsoft or they'll be a very long term presence in their own right, until the 'next big thing' comes along in social networks.

Google tried it with 'orkut', that didn't work out very well except for Brazil, chances are they'll go and do with Facebook what they did with Youtube, buy it to avoid someone else buying it.

Microsoft seems to have missed out on the user generated content almost completely, Facebook might be very attractive to them.

The payoff for FB investors/owners will likely be unlike anything else seen in the history of the net.
Yes, Obama raised most of his money online, and his average donation was $86 (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27262116/).
In a bout of major depression, creativity is just lost. The feeling that I will never get it back was a main source feeding suicidal thinking. Luckily, I sought treatment, and an analyst told me that this is normal, that it's part of the illness, and that basically nobody can be creative while being clinically depressed (yes, I was in a clinic at that time). That helped, at least a little.

I'm fighting, and I'm slowly getting it back. But it's hard.
i wonder how a place like california got into such mess.

They were ground zero for a pair of US bubbles. This caused the state's revenues to skyrocket. Believing revenues would always skyrocket, groups which have essentially captured the state and municipality budgeting processes voted themselves large increases in benefits. It is politically impossible to reduce those benefits once enacted, yet they automatically snowball in costs every year. Its like the miracle of compound interest, except in reverse, and with the full principal being due every year.

The bubbles have burst and California no longer sees the potential for staggering revenue growth every year, but will see double-digit increases in benefits outlays for the politically powerful groups.

Bonus points: every time California has a short-term lack of funds they negotiate with their beneficiary groups to trade a lack of increase this year (note: not a cut, just less increase than they would have otherwise gotten) in favor of a new entitlement due in N years, whose NPV is astoundingly higher than the savings due to the lack-of-increase.
Again, look at our poll: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=849650

This is not "a sample set of one". There's a pattern here.
My husband's company invited their IP lawyer to give a talk on software patents a few years ago. He compared them to the English enclosure movement of the 16-17th centures - no one really believes they're protecting innovation so much as providing a way for the established companies to declare their territory and ward off upstarts.

Of course, it didn't stop him from recommending that they look for patentable aspects of their software. The other benefit to holding patents is that the best way to prevent an infringement suit is to have the ability to counter-sue based on your own patent collection.
Is there some particular reason you didn't put the URL in the URL field?

For anyone else annoyed:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/04/california-faili...
The Economist in July of this year made an interesting contrast between the fiscal policies of California and Texas.

http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13990207
See my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859479
It is also worth noting that a lot of what we consider "non-essential" did not start out that way. Pfizer did not discover Viagra because they were looking to help aging baby boomers get wood; it started out as a treatment for angina (hypertension kills millions...) and it was not until phase one trials that it was discovered that one of the side-effects of sildenafil was to encourage erections. Along the route to trying to cure a deadly disease a blockbuster non-essential drug was discovered.
Seems like nowadays, everyone's saying SQL database do not scale, while apparently, most crowded sites are using mySQL (or other SQL based) and scaling it quite well, producing speedy websites that serve billions of pages everyday.
Sharding isn't scaling

Sure sharding is scaling, although there are several types of sharding, with varying degrees of scalability. Usually people use a combination of both database (which what I was talking about) and table sharding (w/ replication,clustering,etc.) to achieve scalability. I've encountered several highly-scalable db environments like these.

It's not application-transparent

There are several databases that have features that can make sharding transparent to your application.

and it's an operational nightmare

it depends on the RDBMS that you're using.
http://recycleusb.com/ will turn them into bootable drives with Sugar (the OS developed for the One Laptop Per Child project) and donate them to elementary schools.
1. VC do invest in a lot of things beyond "the next hot thing on the web", including hardware, cleantech, enterprise software, etc.

2. VCs have a responsibility to get returns for their investors, not fix the government's fiscal problems.

3. Those "next hot things" have at one time or another included companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and others, which have together contributed billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs to the state of CA. Not bad for some stupid web 2.0 fad, huh?
The organization would not lobby for any position directly. Instead, lobbying firms that specialize in the given policy areas would lobby on behalf of the users that support those policies, and the users could have a say in which lobbying firms are used for particular issues.

Regarding how to handle majority vs minority positions, that's a good question that I have been debating myself. One way would be to use money allocated for each position to hire separate firms to lobby for the given position. The pro is that if the competing positions are truly what the people want and have not been manipulated by corporate lobbyists, then at least the people's voice is being heard. The downside is that you are creating an arms race so the people are spending more money than they need to because money from either side is canceling out the effects of the other.

Another way you could approach it is make it so that money from the minority nullifies the money from the majority before it's paid to lobbyists so users in the majority and minority end up paying less (the minority pays nothing and the majority only pays the difference). This keeps lobbyists from being the major benefactor and saves the people's money so they can use it to support other issues. The downside is that the minority might want its money spent anyway and then you get into a type of Prisoner's Dilemma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_dilemma).

Allowing the money to be spent may be the best way since it is the voice of the electorate -- even if the electorate has opposing views because at least it's the voice of the electorate, not corporations.
It's all part of the Gramscian Damage. The famous Unix guru Eric Raymond had a very illuminating post on this:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260

If you ask most Americans who invaded Poland in 1939, most will simply say "Germany" or "the Nazis". Few will mention the "Soviet Union" or "the Communists". Even fewer will say "the National Socialist German Workers Party". That's part of the Gramscian Damage.

University humanities and social science departments are relentlessly conformist, though they certainly don't see themselves that way. Since they largely control the inflow of ideas into the culture, they can choke off whatever they want. So, the CCP largely gets a pass.