skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Especially when things move as fast as they do with memory and storage. Just 5 or 6 years ago I was buying a new 80gb SATA disk for just over CAD$100 (iirc). We've gone from around $1/gb then to almost exactly 10¢/gb. Probably cheaper for you guys south of the 49th.

edit: DirectCanada has disks cheaper than NCIX by almost 2¢/gb as well.

In comparison the average price for an SSD is CAD$375 for ~120gb, so let's call it $400 to make things easy, it's going to cost more with tax anyway. So it's around $3/gb or $3.50/gb which is 35x the cost.

However if you are building a new box and spending $1500+ anyway then an SSD is probably a very wise choice.
> Right, that's called bait and switch. No relation to price gouging.

Actually, I didn't describe bait and switch. And, even if I did, the question isn't whether that bad behavior has any relationship to price-gouging, the question is whether suppliers who engage in crappy behavior should be given good labels.

Suppliers who advertise at prices and don't come through are crappy, regardless of what they do after not coming through. Calling them "non-gouging" is inappropriate.
I agree about the news in the WSJ. First class. But I wish they wouldn't bundle it with the ideology section. (also, the FT is more relevant to us Europeans)
I have an eeepc which I regularly use for webbrowsing and reading docs on the couch (it runs FreeBSD with OpenBox). I find the keyboard too small to type comfortably. So don't ditch your fullsize laptop yet ;-)
1) Sure, find a non-paypal way to send me 20 dollars plus your credit card number and I'll fill it out for you.

2) That's called "cramming" and you should report it to the FCC so that (hopefully, someday) they can put those guys out of business.

3) That's called "micropayments" and people have been talking about it for over a decade. There are major technical and political problems to implementing it and, ultimately, I think most people would prefer to get ads on their web pages than having to pay a penny to view it.
I'll be there, but I'll be late, so don't y'all all pack up and move from there. Besides, I'm already budgeting for the calories of a burger.
While his point is actually a good one, as I was beginning to read the article, the cynical little voice said "huh - arguing about kinds of technical debt - I guess he has too much time on his hands". But it's not like I don't blow plenty of my own time on less worthwhile pursuits, so to each his own.
I actually made good use of this on a hacking trip with poor connectivity. It's really a nice system.
Shipping the prototype as production code and not maintaining, fixing, rewriting or deleting it would be reckless debt.
Deaf people can't hear cars coming, but that doesn't mean they should have bright flashing lights which are on all the time. Disabled people can't cross the street as fast, but that doesn't mean cars should be limited to 5 mph to ensure they can cross.

Aside from the fact that blind people are a small minority of the population (blind meaning people who could not tell visually whether a car was on the road; plenty of people who are legally blind could still make this distinction), there are already other measures in place to prevent cars from hitting blind people. Guide animals are available which can see hybrid cars coming just as well as they can see gasoline-powered cars coming. Signs are posted as warnings in neighborhoods where blind or deaf children are known to live.

Furthermore, there are other solutions available. Crossings where this is a concern can have small grooves cut in the road leading up to the crossing so ALL cars make noise when coming through (ever hear a car going over a drawbridge?). It is important to note that crossings where this is a concern are a subset of all crossings and that crossings make up only a small fraction of the surface area of the world's road systems. Maybe 1% of road surface is crossings where blind people need to hear cars coming, but this suggestion would add noise pollution to 100% of road surface traveled by hybrid or electric cars.

In your parking lot example, I would add the rule that you should assume every car with a driver in it is running and preparing to move in much the same way that you should assume every gun is loaded and treat it as if it were even if you know it's not. Also, I frequently walk behind cars I know to be running. I am cautious but I am also somewhat relying on the driver seeing me. No amount of safety measures will stop stupid people (like the driver you encountered) from being dangerous. A driver can just as easily gun it going backwards (thus giving people no time to react) in a gasoline car.

Finally, there are edge cases where cars making noise makes them more dangerous. Noise draws attention. If you're driving through a particularly bad part of town, you may not want to draw attention. Passing through without making a sound may increase your safety. If you leave your hybrid running (accidentally or intentionally) for a short time, a potential thief might not know it and therefore might not try to steal your car. With a gasoline powered car, they will always know it. The point is that edge cases are just that: edge cases.

There is no inherent reason why cars should make noise. None.
Absolutely! And 100 kWh /year is a very conservative estimate, almost pessimistic. Most of the studies claim savings in the range of 600 kWh - so 60$ per computer per year. For those who have the habit of keeping their PC on all night, savings would be much higher - more so for organizations with large networks.
That's probably an issue, I'm very - very - old fashioned when it comes to editors, I switch systems all the time so I've come to rely on a minimal subset (vi, without any fancy plug ins) to do my work.

This is probably a limiting factor. For years I thought of IDEs as training wheels, I'm beginning to see that in some cases IDEs are more than that.

But I'll never be comfortable with them.

My idea of building an application is to log on to the server, create an svn directory and start hacking away at it. That's probably not the most productive way to get things done these days.

The only language that I work in where I made the concession to use an IDE is Java, simply because there are too many syntactic gotchas that I can't seem to predict ahead of time and the ECT cycle is ridiculously long on the project that I'm working on. So that's where (at least to me) the IDE seems to be worth the fact that I can only work on that stuff when sitting in front of a serious machine.

I'd hate to run intellij on a laptop screen, forget about a netbook.
On that note, someone just searched for "Why is Mystery Google so ninja" and got back "Mind control".

Indeed.
HR's bonus, tho' is calculated on metrics like staff turnover.
I believe the Neo FreeRunner can run Android: http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_FreeRunner_GTA02_Hardware

I'd suggest you start with some sort of kit unless you're a real whiz. It's not a small project.
The article states "it used blogs and a wiki to mediate a fully open collaboration", but how about running (not just writing) the algorithms (code) to test and experiment collaboratively?

This is the goal of open-source projects like http://codenode.org and http://sagenb.org.
True, it is absolutely beyond that. But I think that it would have helped significantly in an earlier stage, I even think that PHP would have been run into the ground.

In the long run that may still happen, there definitely is shift happening.
Indeed, the real goal of a sociopath engineer might not be to gain control over the org charts, but instead to gain control over the UML diagrams.
The only answer I can see is a boycott, but people's lives are now essentially based around copyrighted content.

Culture is a human need, so you'd be asking people to give up something they biologically can't.

In other words, if you care about this sort of issue, you're 100% screwed (and I do care, quite a bit).
lucky guess :-)
"The simple reason is that if you over-perform at the loser level, it is clear that you are an idiot. You’ve already made a bad bargain, and now you’re delivering more value than you need to, making your bargain even worse."

I'm surprised this post is so popular on HN. Isn't working for a startup - pouring your time into someone else's company for below-market wages and some piddly fraction of a percent in equity - basically the definition of cluelessness, according to the author?
The desire that's built in is the online tower building. But I don't do it for that. I do it for the thrill of seeing how efficiently I can make my pieces.

The graphics are beautiful. The soundtrack is incredible. The humor is perfectly executed. The feel of the controls I hope to one day equal. The physics engine's to die for.

I don't know you, barrkel, so hopefully you don't take it personally when I say: You'd value that package at two dollars? Pathetic. This is what I hate about the gaming community. You said you got six hours of play out of it, and don't think that was worth $20? I pay $10 for a CD with 40-60 minutes of music on it. I pay $15 for a 3-hour movie. This masterpiece of a puzzle game you value at two dollars. Unbelievable.

It's worth mentioning that I can't stand most first-person shooters. The Orange Box ones (Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal) are the only ones I've played and liked. The level of workmanship on the average FPS saddens me. They strike me as gimmicky and cheap.

I can't comment on how long it takes to beat World of Goo, because I haven't beat it yet. I'm on the second world out of, what, six?, and I've played it for a few hours. I spent an hour alone trying to hit the challenge records on each level. But the game isn't just about beating levels. It's about the joy of putting things together, seeing what works and what doesn't.

All that was released by a team of two people. Far Cry was made by a team of five hundred people, and it's nowhere near as sleek as World of Goo. I think 2D Boy puts Crytek to shame. They're entrepreneurs and artists and I wish them the best of luck—and it really pisses me off when the tasteless slobs that call themselves the gaming community decide to shit all over a good thing.
Uhhhh.... I'm not a partner at Sequoia.
Thanks. We're glad you like the concept.

We've laid emphasis on aggregate stats and huge figures as we want to tap into the sense of gratification that one gets from being part of a large and meaningful movement.

That being said, we understand that most folks on HN will analyze the data objectively and therefore we've been modest at best with our numbers.

PC Power Management is not a new concept. Giving it a social spin with a game, we believe, is.
> You're conflating refusal to pay taxes with not supporting how those taxes are spent. Those are two very different ways of interacting with the law.

That's what people always say when you point out that they'll injure/kill you if you don't do what they want. They say that you're just being punished for breaking the law because they don't want to be held responsible for what the law requires.

The person in question isn't being punished for breaking "the law", she's being punished for breaking a specific law. By enacting a law, you're saying that whatever that said law mandates is justifies punishing people who break it. Not some abstract law, that law.

Which reminds me, the whole "authority" thing doesn't actually make sense. We did away with authority is the divine right of kings not because kings weren't special, but because authority in that sense, no matter who exercises it, doesn't make sense.

See The Empty Idea of Authority (University of Illinois Law Review, Vol. 2009, No. 5, 2009) by Laurence Claus http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1484980
I haven't run into the problem yet. How do you ask Disk Utility to call TRIM? Does writing 0's over every free block actually have the same effect?
'Magnetic electricity' discovered
It's an implementation detail. It's not the "//" that matters, it's that web browsers weren't offering reasonable abstractions; so this weird detail affected more people than it should have.

These days, you can type "foobar" instead of http://www.foobar.com/ in any browser, and it works. The "//" isn't a big deal.

There's more that browsers could be doing. Why ever display "<anything>://" in a browser, when it could be a menu of protocols?
The Calorie-Restriction Experiment
> He is basically dinging Python for setting up some pretty basic functions like ireduce()

I don't get it. plain "reduce" already works on any iterable.
Bookmarks Printing Needs Your Consistent Planning
3 guys send their balloon into near space
MSI’s X-Slim X400 lands in the US for $800
Nikon D3s is official, available in Novemeber
Here are three things that really bother me:

1. You can't do a threaded reply to the last blip in a thread. You have to make a "footer" and then reply to the next-to-last item.

2. When you copy something to a new wave, it doesn't copy the children over.

3. The hide all replies feature doesn't work yet.

Anyone else find these annoying, or am I missing some settings or not thinking about the first two the right way?
I like the "hunters and fishermen" approach. It's easy for me to totally forget about that market living in San Francisco but a lot of people do that stuff. And they're probably underserved by iPhone apps.
Looks like iPulse.

http://www.mactricksandtips.com/2008/09/ipulse-a-system-reso...

http://iconfactory.com/software/ipulse
That feature's already planned; that's what the "Draft" checkbox is for. I'm sure eventually you'll have a setting to default all blips to draft mode.

You can't expect every feature to be in and working flawlessly in the preview.
I'm sorry, dude: it is not at all easy to meet people as inventive as Farnsworth. Television... compared to making another kind of MEMS accelerometer? And what do these modern inventors do for an encore that compares to inventing what is still the most promising technique in nuclear fusion? Farnsworth was a living god of invention; do not take his name in vain, and compare him to dopes slinging VHDL or whatever.

I agree that inventors labor best in obscurity ... however, these guys were all nominated and carefully selected by Business Week. Some of the top 25 were impressive inventive types, as I realized later: they simply were not mentioned at all in the main article.
i'll try to come down from the nw suburbs for this.

now if i could just find a train schedule...
Maybe bbc did not understand the article, because what they wrote does not make sense.

If someone really did discover a magnetic monopole, that would be HUGE! So I doubt that's what it really is.
We're the site admins, if you have any questions ask away.
Yes, some do, but I'd like to see a more universal option. I imagine it'd be possible.

What I usually end up doing is, like, donating $1.47 to a political campaign...
Careful - that might be an offense under the secret treaty ;-)
A Challange to MP3 Blog Aggregators
Search Engine for Integrated Circuit Pinout References
Gates wrote BASIC at 20 and founded Microsoft in the same year. I thought everyone knew that.

I gladly accede to "mean and venal." However, I also make stuff people use, so I feel perfectly entitled to piss all over ... for example ... yet another webpage design company. I have a half dozen friends who design webpages for money; some of them even do fancy software type things. Why was some random webpage design company featured in business week? There was nothing exceptional about her business model or returns.
you'd be asking people to give up something they biologically can't.

This seems a bit melodramatic... surely buying those particular bits of content that are churned out by the big media producers isn't really a biological need.

I certainly agree that a boycott won't work, but I say for no other reason than good old human laziness combined with an unwillingness to forgo creature comforts.
Copyright is serious. Think of this as a Hannah Montana Album Non-Proliferation Treaty. These are many weapons of mass (cultural) destruction. They must be controlled.
"Big Media" has actually a wishlist for what they want in ACTA [0]. With no response from ACTA negotiators, there's no telling how much pull they actually have.

[0] http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/07/abig-wishlist-for...
"the reason people aren't compensated accordingly [sic] to their production is that it's incredibly hard to judge production." ... perhaps ....

... but perhaps Karl Marx was correct when he said that (basically) the essence of capitalism is in the systematic skimming of "surplus production" by the controllers of capital. In other words, EVERY employee is not paid according to their production.

I also think that this commenter has really swallowed the ideology (ie, is clueless): not every boss wants production from their underlings. Perhaps the owners want production, but managers don't necessarily -- changes in production might make them look bad, it might reset the expected quota level for their department, it might upset next years budget, etc. The interests of employees <> interests of owners, and managers are employees.
You mean opinions like this: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020425140457434...

I sometimes agree or disagree with the opinion page, but in general I find it thought provoking.
The constitution, in Article II Section 2, gives the president the power to make treaties, but two-thirds of the Senate has to approve the treaty. I don't see how they can vote on it if they can't see it. (Even if they don't tend to read what they vote on, they have to be _able_ to read it.)

I suppose the entire Senate could be sworn to secrecy, along with their aides who do most of their reading for them, but I'm sure a bunch of them will object to that and vote no. And even if they don't, sooner or later the law has to be made public so it can be enforced, so any senators who vote for it will be held accountable. (To the extent they're ever held accountable for their votes.)

So this may be classified now, but I don't see how it can remain that way if it's going to become a treaty. It'd have to become a classified executive order that's not subject to congressional approval. That may not satisfy whoever is pushing for a full-fledged treaty, though.
Which means that an engineer is a "loser" in this system; and in terms of monetary gain, they may very well be. The author stresses that "loser" is not the same as "bad person" or "living their life according to wacked principles".
Very exciting.

It's kind of the anti-Andrew Wiles (who worked alone and in secret for many years before proving Fermat's last theorem).
Good blog
$900(or so) vs. $300 I paid apple for theirs, which still gives me a significant benefit compared to a non ssd.
I also risk my life daily by driving a car. There's a point at which you have to accept the risks of certain activities to lead the life you want.
If you are anything like me you read this article and went "wait... they discovered magnetic monopoles?"

Here's some wikipedia goodness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_monopole#.22Monopoles....

which leads you to...

* http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2009/01/29/making-m...

* http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090903163725.ht...
OS X does not support trim, so I'm not sure what jrnkntl is talking about.

How do you ask Disk Utility to call TRIM?

You can't.

Does writing 0's over every free block actually have the same effect?

No. (We might like it to, but apparently SSDs don't actually look at the data they're storing and thus it would cost more for them to detect zeros.)
The article handles the case of people who derive a meaning from outside of their work and the people who are looking for financial success and power/status within a corporation.

As I've mentioned in a previous comment, the article doesn't take into account the fact that there are people who

a) look for a meaning that isn't centered around money or power

b) derive it from their work

If you're an engineer working for a start-up (taking a below market wage, working long hours, so on) only because you are hoping for a large pay day, then you are a fool. If you're working for a start-up because you enjoy programming or because you're looking to learn what it takes to run your own start-up then you can get a lot of a start-up so the equation doesn't apply.

On the topics of start-ups and money, Paul Buchheit said best: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/12/is-there-more-to-li...
Totally agreed. Bundler is finally the solution to some of the RubyGem failings over the years. RubyGems has been friggin awesome, and one of the best best aspects of the Ruby environment, however the dependency management was not its strong suit and the fact that it declares dependencies one at a time means it might be impossible to fix with RubyGems itself.

Bundler is an amazing solution to this, and the fact that it works within RubyGems (via "gem bundle" command) should make this the ubiquitous solution to deploying apps for the future.

Also should plug the fact that the wycats/clerche duo has been working on this problem for a while. Their last major success with it was with the thor bundler with Merb, which was been working well for me over the last 9 months (I've now switched to the new bundler).
"someone else's company"

Here lies your answer.

A lot of people here either wants to or they already did start own company, so they are more in the position of "sociopaths" (according to the post's terminology - see "The MacLeod Life Cycle of the Firm" chart).
They're not true magnetic monopoles. If I understand correctly, they're unusual crystal structures that approximate the behavior of a monopole in some ways, but they aren't true monopoles. Div(B) still equals zero.

Here's an article I found from a month ago that explains spin ice better than the OP:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/09/10/physici...
I would tend to believe that some significant portion of CIA tasks would require (or at least largely benefit from) some form of security clearance elsewhere in the world, which in turn would require (or at least largely benefit from) the said cleared person being a national from the country in question.

Otherwise I believe you are right in most cases. One would have to be rather naive to simply accept such an offer blindly.
Decent commentary (and a more sensibly written article) can be found in this previous HN thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804831
Surviving is a reasonable cause for celebration. May not last though
We used it exclusively when we went to railscamp New England and there was no internet. There is also hidden movie on the webpage.
It's the latest and greatest SVN as of August, (can't recall what release that is).

Branching is instantaneous, which is faster than TFS. Where it slows us down is iterfacing with the trunk (primarily updates to the local working copy). Because our application is huge and highly integrated a whole lot of source files exist in one repository.

Under TFS the repository knows what is going on with every client working copy. SVN is ignorant of working copies.All of the interaction between repository and working copy consists of doing "stuff" on two files systems, rather than doing it in the "brain" of a SQL server.

I've got a much smaller SVN implementation that executes updates and commits much faster. It only makes sense the file based approach will start slowing down at some scale.

Merging has not been an issue for us, once we got used to how it works. It's a sister organization of ours under the same corporate umbrella that can't figure it out, and I suspect that has more to do with their internal processes than SVN.