skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No idea how my statement could come across as defensive - the intention was rather offensive. And I must say I'm quite disappointed by the response.

Sorry if I acome across like an angry nerd by now but a) that's what I am and b) do you really think this is a good forum to play the smoke & mirrors game in?

Many of us over here build systems like the ones you are selling. False claims like "rackspace is giving their storage away for free" simply don't work for us.

I feel insulted when reading bollocks like that. Why do you try to treat me like an idiot?

The rackspace storage does ofcourse not come "free". The cost was simply factored into the base-fee.

Let's compare the largest instance where we can make a match, shall we:

Monthly fee | Rackspace 8G Instance | EC2 "Large"
-------------+------------------------+-----------------
Monthly Fee | $345.60 | $288.00
640G Disk | $0.00 | $64.00
=============^========================+================
$345.60 | $352.00

Rackspace comes out ahead by a lousy $6.40 or 2%.
That's your definition of free, yes?

Want me to make that comparison with a reserved instance? Ah, thanks for asking, I knew you wanted.

Monthly fee | Rackspace 8G Instance | "Large" reserved
-------------+------------------------+-----------------
Monthly Fee | $345.60 | $162.00
640G Disk | $0.00 | $64.00
=============^========================+================
$345.60 | $226.00

Oops. By the means of a simple 1 year commitment EC2 suddenly comes out ahead quite a worthwhile $119.60 or 35%.

And know what, one great thing we could use these $120 saved bucks for would be to add 1.2T more storage! How's that? And what would the price for that be at rackspace anyways? Oh sorry, I forget, 640G ought to be enough for everybody...

Well, I'll stop already, you see where it's headed. :-)

For your own good, please refrain from bending facts the way you did above when speaking to a technical audience. Unless having nerds like me pop out of the wood and redact you in public is part of your marketing strategy...
"College is unquestionably more rigorous today."
This is likely true at the high-end. But the vast majority of college students are not at the high-end. At the mean, universities have to mop-up after a dysfunctional K-12 establishment based on self-esteem and social-promotion. Remedial reading, writing, and mathematics are common at second- and third-tier universities. The scope of "special needs" has been broadened to include customers who are incapable of producing college-level coursework.

To ensure that students who elect to pursue a rigorous education are not penalized relative to those who do not so choose, grades at those institutions have been inflated to meaningless extent.

The educational industrial complex is geared toward growth. Effectively serving that market requires lower baseline standards and less meaningful quality metrics within the serviced population. Certainly the market is consuming more educational product than in the early 60s, but whether this produces a better educated populace is less obvious--unless "better educated" is defined to mean "consumed more educational product."

~

"in the early 60s there was a massive gender gap in college attendance"
As an aside, today's gender gap is the opposite: colleges attract fewer males than females. If you consider graduation and 4-year graduation rates, the gap is greater and growing faster. I don't know that this marketing failure says anything about the quality of education though.
Graphic design to programming. The Ruby on Rails way.
I was recently reading a reply made in response to Obie Fernandez (of Hashrocket and The Rails Way fame) who suggested RMM. RMM stands for Rails Maturity Model. I can’t say for certain that I agree or take a stance on either side of the fence, I can say however that the quote above really struck a chord with me. I am one of those (sophisticated?) graphic designers that found an entry into web application development and programming via the ever popular Ruby on Rails framework...(continued)
halshura at gmail
That jaywalking bullshit again?! Totally untrue.
> Literacy became much more common by the mid 1800s

Book and pamphlet sales indicate high literacy during the revolutionary period. I do not think think there was ever much illiteracy in the US.

New England and Puritans have nothing to do with anything. The German speaking towns in Pennsylvania had near universal literacy in German.
Would be very interesting to see a comparison of a typical 1961 operating budget vs a typical 2008 operating budget, to see where the differences are.

My guess would be that the biggest differences would be for teachers' pensions and benefits, extracurricular activities, technology, facilities -- but that's just a guess.

I can't imagine that they spend 3.5x as much on textbooks..
Michael Mitzenmacher, at Harvard, had a paper in the 2003 IEEE Data Compression Conference that gave empirical evidence that translations compressed to roughly similar sizes (using the Bible and the EU texts), but had wildly varying sizes uncompressed; this correlates well with linguistic theories.

ftp://ftp.deas.harvard.edu/techreports/tr-12-02.ps.gz
"Because the world is objectively real, of course some things are better than others, by any reasonable criteria."

Given a set of criteria with objective measures, one can objectively tell if something meets those criteria, or not, or whether it meets more of those criteria, or not. But words like better and good express emotional value judgements. It is, as far as I can tell, impossible to prove that my criteria for what makes something good is objectively better than yours.

E.g., I may think food A is better than food B because it is spicier. You may may think food A is worse than food B for the very same reason. How do you determine whose version of better really is?
Evidence? I know the guy personally, he seems legit.
offtopic: I accessed your site and the fact that you framed facebook made me think it was some kind of phishing. my 2c.
This seems interested, I'd love to help you beta test.

jimengland at gmail
Actually, nevermind. Why am I even replying to an account that was created 1 hour ago with only 1 inflammatory comment?
I like this if only for the fact that the idea was born of necessity.

For me at least it seems the ideas always come when I'm busy building other projects.

It also seems pretty relevant to where online marketing is headed.

Best of luck
flooha at gmail
Government Lotteries: Like Rats in a Cage?
There was high literacy because Americans were more affluent. Slaves and indentured servants aside, there simply weren't the masses of deeply impoverished folks toiling long hours to survive as were common in Europe. People had the leisure to read.

The public schooling movement had nothing to do with literacy or a culture that valued education. It was about nationalism and cultural uniformity. Elite WASPs wanted to hammer all those urban Catholics and ethnically disparate (German, French speaking, etc) rural kids into Americans in their own image. There was armed resistance to public schooling. It was something imposed on communities that did not want or need it.
Yes, but in the past it wasn't like only great students went to college. My Dad's sole motivation for college was escaping the Vietnam draft. There were many like him. In fact the college he attended went out of business because it was so bad and so few students wanted to go there.
The Red Queen problem in global oil production: Running to stand still
It seems people often gloss over the issue of redundancy when making these comparisons as well.

If the server hosting your EC2 instance fails, you just bring up a replacement and continue on your way. If you are on a traditional VPS, you either have to bring up a new instance from backup, or wait for the provider to get things running again, but at least they have some strong motivation to since multiple customers are down. If you have a rented or coloed server, you have to wait for someone to fix it, with shorter guaranteed turn-around times costing you more.

You might be able to make the case that you could deploy an app on a single EC2 instance
because in the event of failure, your downtime probably runs much less than an hour. Downtime due to a hardware problem on a rented or coloed server is likely to be much more than that. Maybe that tradeoff is acceptable to keep the costs down, but it is a tradeoff. If you aren't willing to make that tradeoff, your cheaper rented or coloed server is actually two servers, with a rough doubling in costs.
OPEC’s Oil Quota Compliance Falls to 62%, IEA Says
Merger Boom Will Be Next Bubble to Shake Markets
fdcleary at gmail
Thanks for pointing that out.

I don't remember why I did it that way.

I changed them to more sensible variable names.
"Easily", how?

"Fraction" - 9/10ths, 7/8ths.

I really don't know what you would cut out of schools to make it better. Teachers are under paid, most school districts are short on their infrastructure budget, and "extraneous" classes like music, art, or physical education are getting cut all over the country.

If you ask me the biggest waste of money in the school district is the computer in every class room theme. So many hundreds of thousands of dollars in every district for computers, IT professionals, ethernet cables strung to every room, software all over. And how many classes are really improved by this?
Failures of Small Banks Grow, Straining F.D.I.C.
Beautiful points. To add to them, I highly doubt that people who truly want failing to go to college due to the cost of college is common occurrence. Student loans are relatively easy to get, much financial aid is need based, and if all else fails the military will pay 100% tuition in most cases.

I do know of people that had to leave college in order to financially provide for family members, for instance an unexpected pregnancy, but that is different than the cost of college itself being a problem.
Zaemis: Currying in PHP
http://www.mentalfloss.com/store/product.php?productid=16277
The Real Estate Technology Battle
The trick of a good parasite is to let the host live and be a small enough nuisance that the host won't kill the parasite.

The RIAA is getting dangerously close to the 'squash' button.

A few more 100K+ verdicts and I'm sure they'll achieve their goals of irrelevance.
I jaywalk all the time (well, not all the time, but you get what I mean) in Germany and I have never ever been yelled at. But it is uncommon, at least in the smaller towns. In bigger cities nobody would bat an eye, but you'd better be careful because unlike say Amsterdam it is not the expected behaviour.
Could you tell me too, please? A friend of mine has asked me to help him sell a three character .com domain name and I don't know how. What do you think it would go for?
it's a facebook page. we're a facebook app. but thanks :)
A friend of mine is doing this right now. The project involves a whole pile of electronics, a card system and a bunch of other things, he's already working out how to make millions of the things but he doesn't have a customer yet.

The scary thing is he is hugely successful at most of the things he does. It's going to be interesting to see how it comes out.
The Underutilized Power Of The Video Demo To Explain What You Do
And most likely not just yours. In fact, I'd say that success is merely the re-application of lessons learned during previous failures. And that success without preceding failures is very rare and should be right next to 'winning the lottery'.
No, he's saying you can imitate a design that is not protected by trademark; quite unlike the Coke logo.

They do declare copyright on the design, but that doesn't protect against designs that are merely similar.
Percentage wise those have both died and you make valid points, but that is hardly death in a true sense. Family farms are still alive and well in many places in America, as are plays, they are just smaller percentages than in the past.
There is something about this that irks me.
I'm sure that once a person has secured their twinkling place in the startup firmament, it is gratifying to look down on the all the posers/wantrepreneurs/nontrepreneurs as lesser beings...
Not everyone moves at the same pace. Some people take awhile to get the courage. Some people can't run home to mom and dad if their finances turned to custard when their startup flames out. (There is a lot of risk taking freedom when someone knows that in the worst case failure they'll just ask dad for 5 grand and start over).
Yes there are entrepreneurs and there are unproven entrepreneurs...so what?
Oh oh. Seems to be down now.
activated!
From the OP: The evidence for one side can still be a lot stronger than the evidence for the other.
My GF is starting up a business in head hunting in the energy sector: http://www.boolos.com/

predictably times are slow right now so to lift the profile of our startup she has created a blog at blog.boolos.com which is well received by her peers.
I'm not sure if I understand exactly what is the current limitation.

Is the main point of this to create something like [!a] ? (ok not really - it's about parts of "a" being strict) Is it just the current syntax / spec limitation that we can't do this? Can it be safely ported in this or some other way into the standard list implementation?
It's back up. I think my webhost just restarted apache or something.
I've heard that about the protocol. Since I have no intention of building anything with it, I'll allow that it might be good. But the proof will be in the pudding!

I'm really sad that the Wave app is so bad. I think we all expect better from Google (reasonably or otherwise).
So, now we at least know he's not a C programmer.
Haha, my roommate is in this class. His textbook is really nice, it reads really naturally. But my roommate said that his lecturing is not that great.
The OP asked for feedback, and I figured it was better he heard it from me than from 37signals' lawyers.

It doesn't look like 37 signals has trademarked that particular color scheme or design, and I don't see any evidence that they own or have an exclusive license to the font in question; so there really seems to be no legal concern here at all.
I think the take home lesson here about writing more clearly has to do with presenting your text in a format that is easy to read. Thanks!
I disagree; he's one of my favorite lecturers.
Someone tell me if this is right (it's just guesswork):

Decades ago, there was a clear distinction between colleges and vocational schools (or "trade schools"). The purpose of colleges was to bring you into a certain culture and tradition: the culture of educated people. The purpose of vocational schools was practical job training, nothing more.

Attending "college" was more prestigious, but also of little interest to most people. (Most people are basically practical.) Social initiatives to bring poorer people into the educated world put money into colleges, not vocational schools. But most people don't want to learn about Keats and the Magna Carta and that sort of thing, they just want to get skills to do a job to make more money than they could without those skills.

Over time, the purpose of colleges became confused. People today see colleges as intended to provide job training, and just doing a lousy job of it. Colleges, with their state funding, grabbed much of the market from vocational schools, killing off most of them.

So today, we have many colleges, with vast numbers of students. Most of the students mostly jump through useless bureaucratic hoops for four or five years, don't learn the things educated people know, and don't get job skills, either.
That is so true. My partner in business is a lady that is dyslexic, but extremely smart. If I would be distracted by her spelling I'd miss the good stuff in the message

It's very important to remember that language is a tool for communicating ideas, if you focus on the language as the 'end' you are forgetting it is only a 'means'.
contact at tallstreet.com
OSX Apps To Help You Focus & Be Productive
Too bad they don't just make it the top level README file which github would display
Vote me down if you like, but while I do agree that there are tons of clones - I actually find value in some of the niche sites - that bring the same UX that I am accustomed to, to a community that is knowledgeable about a niche I am interested in.

There will likely be many of these sites going out of business indeed, however the good ones will last. I really like the answers.onstartups.com version, and there are a few other good ones.

Would be nice if people could customize the interface a lot more though.
However, the parasites in the content industry have a symbiotic relationship with the parasites who would do the squashing.
As China's economy grows, so do mounds of garbage
agreed, it's definitely cloned.

The simplest would be to ask if it is ok. I don't think they'd have a problem with it.
ekpyrotic at gmail dot com
Teaching Students to Sift Mountains of Data
You got it. I'm reading steve blank's book (slowly...it's tough) and trying to formulate my own unique way of applying it to web applications. This reminds me: I'm gonna go spend an hour reading.
tonyhuynh29 at gmail
So you want to learn morse code
And my friendly disagreement is that literacy among American colonists was something more generally sought than compelled, especially if we keep all the colonies and not just the Puritan colonies of New England in view. (My ancestors who arrived in America the earliest were New England Puritans, and they and others of my ancestors were literate before they left Europe. I have books in the German language at home that have been owned by family members since they were published in the 1600s.)
You only need two skills to succeed in business: the ability to negotiate and the ability to sell. Buy low (goods, services, knowledge), sell high.

Without knowing your personally, I would say you need to work on the sales side of things, as there is quite a bit of rejection in your past.
you're welcome & activated
Hmm. No, its not about making it strict -- (!) already does that. It is about changing the representation entirely, so that you get specialized code and data for every different type, rather than reusing slower, general purpose functions.

The code examples show the different, as do the pictures of the heap.

This is some kind of extremely aggressive, but uniform, specialization.
bart at customerfind.the-bart dot org
"I really don't know what you would cut out of schools to make it better."

First, there is a lot of administrative overhead that has nothing to do with instruction. Second, the Gary Plan is inherently very wasteful. Under the current system when kids fall behind (or if they're gifted) then you need to do 'pullouts'. This is enormously expensive. On the other hand, if you were to do something akin to open systems instruction then a kid would stay in the same 'class' only until they finished the unit, and then move on to a new teacher for the next unit. This means you wouldn't have to do pullouts, because the kids who were having trouble would just spend more time in that section. Then each school just has one or two people who monitor the pupil's time per unit compared to their expected time to complete that unit, which is based on their past performance in the subject compared to the standard performance on that unit. The other benefit of this is that now you have accountability for each student throughout the system as a whole, whereas currently troubled students are just shuffled from class to class without anyone caring enough to fix the problem.
Uh,

"Data Liberation", as in educated users, is the solution.

You back up your data because no cares as much about your data as you do (repeat...). It's like basic hygene. In the future, few people will be actual computer experts but everyone will know a few things. Backing up data will be one of them. A large enough density of people who understand this will mean those who will lack excuses - see main story!
I know that Moniker does this exact kind of auctions. You could just start at http://domainauctions.moniker.com/how_to_sell and try to find them through their website. Or email my user name at gmail.com and I can ask internally (they are owned by the same company that owns my employer) for who you can get in contact with there behind the scenes. Of course I may be told that people are supposed to go through the website, though that is less likely if the domain name is a really good one. :-)
austin [at] beatnex [dot] com
I believe the point was not about the quote itself, but about the fact that that C code does not compile . . .
Feedback: Let the user choose the language of the keywords.
Spreadsheet of all TED talks
"Teachers are under paid"

What makes you think so? Working 9 months/yr, elementary school teachers average $52,240 or $5804/mo., high school teachers $54,390 or $6043/mo.. These are jobs with tremendous security and benefits. The average registered nurse makes $65,130 or $5427/mo. Accountants average $65,840 or $5486/mo.

http://www.bls.gov/oes/2008/may/oes_nat.htm#b25-0000

"…the biggest waste of money in the school district is the computer in every class room…"

Right on. You and I agree with Steve Jobs:

"I used to think that technology could help education. I've probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I've had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.

It's a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they're inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I'm one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system."

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html
If you are willing to do a bit of encoding/decoding, then you can map 2 or 3 latin-1 characters onto one unicode codepoint, and then tweet with that instead.

My understanding of UTF-8 indicates that you can actually represent any number as one character, but somewhere in the xterm / firefox / twitter pipeline, that gets fucked up. I think I have some code on github for this, actually:

http://gist.github.com/191446

The idea is to pack any utf-8 string into one character. It works for about 3 or 4 ASCII characters, but I think this is a perl bug rather than some fundamental limitation. Patches welcome.

(As an aside, I am always pleased when I get to use the (>>=) operator in Perl. And yes, I do pronounce it "bind" and not "right-shift-equals" ;)
"Free account for HN community" should read "Free trial account for HN community" in my opinion, as the former is rather misleading.
Castanaut: Automate your screencasts (in Ruby)
1. How does that prove anything? What you are effectively saying is that standing in front of a bus will only kill you in an objective universe.

2. The comment you replied to did not state that the commentator holds that view, it was merely an observation that they didn't expect certain content in the article.
Whether or not the science is beyond dispute is irrelevant.

How does this follow? If a scientific question is largely unresolved, we don't even have a basis upon which to evaluate decisions yet. Generally, disputed science never even touches on the political sphere.

Now, with global warming the science is in fact largely settled, and thus we've moved on to the stage wherein one political faction says "This science demands that I do a bunch of unrelated things I wanted to do anyway!", whilst the other faction says "This science is inconvenient to my ideology, thus I will stubbornly deny objective reality!".

Ah, politics.