skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
About 10 years ago, I would given some credence to such articles with simplistic solutions (privatize and fire workers) to complex problems. Now I recognize it as a potentially slanted article.

In particular foreign private oil companies have a long history of not paying adequate royalties to the countries they operate in (which is the reason they get nationalized after popular revolts). Even the US govt sued Exxon in Alabama for systematically underpaying royalties (they lost, but whatever).

I remember a memorable article circa 2002 which said China was on the brink of collapse due to bad loans held by it's state owned banks (yeah, right). Another one chided China for not given a majority of board seats in partially-privatized banks to foreign investors with small shareholdings.
It's been three years for me. Still not over.
I first read about this in an article in Analog Science Fiction magazine. The technology sounded cool but the venue of publication seemed inauspicious. . . I really hope this produces something.
Robert Bussard has more detail in his Google Tech Talk: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606&...
But Facebook, with >300m users, is an edge case. It's a business model in the same way getting into acting in order to become as rich as Tom Cruise is a business model.

37Signals model of charging for a service, on the other hand, can at least appear reasonably replicable (though also much harder than it seems, if you don't have Fried's natural talent for marketing & PR)
Switch statistics should be able to rule that one out for you.
Put another way, he's leaving a gap that can be filled with very little overhead. What happens if big news corps refuse to be online? Someone else will be online. The latter will be read.

I'm not going back to print. Rupert be damned.
What programming language should be learned first?
"... Heavily used neurons were learning to fire together, and these chains of neurons were becoming myelinated in thin sheaths of fat; by this process, “gray matter” is converted into “white matter.” The sheath surrounding the nerves acts as an electrical insulator, increasing neural speed by 100-fold. Active repetition also began tuning up the nerve capsules that connected his prefrontal cortex to his parietal cortex in the back of the brain. When these superhighways of nerve tissue come on board, the brain learns to delegate math to the back of the brain, making computation speed radically faster. ..."

Practice, repetition, rehearsal.

"... Something else happened early in second grade. One afternoon, while watching the Phillies march to their World Series title, my wife taught our son how to read a box score—how math and symbols represented the game’s progress. Within a two-month span, our son lost every last drop of his interest in Pokémon, and he fell in love with sports. ..."

Motivation.

"... According to Dr. Silvia Bunge, a neuroscientist at U.C. Berkeley, the presence of dopamine triggers a meaningful tweak in the tuning function of brain cells. Dopamine depolarizes neurons and improves their firing rate; their response to optimal stimuli becomes sharper, and the background buzz of relevant stimuli is quieted a little. In other words, each neuron operates sort of like a motivated child: It becomes focused, less distractable, and when it does something right, it recognizes that in the moment—it hangs on to that information, ready to use it again. ..."

Distraction.
Print newspapers are the buggy whip industry of the 21st century. Look at the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

“Rupert Murdoch is going to battle against the Internet, bent on making readers actually pay for online newspaper journalism…” People were not willing to pay for their product printed on paper when it came loaded with tons of money saving coupons, I doubt very many people will take out a credit card and pay for it online on a regular basis.

I think the news industry has more than a content delivery mechanism problem here. I certainly won’t be buying any shares of their stock based on this new business model proposed by Mr. Murdoch, lol.
The only thing that kind of bothered me was that Bitbucket focused too much on blaming Amazon. Here's a sports example. Let's say a team loses because the left tackle messes up and the quarterback gets sacked. After the game, during a press conference, does the quarterback say that they lost, but it's the left tackle's fault? No. Even if the quarterback believes he himself performed great, he'll still take part of the blame. That's because it's the professional thing to do, and people respect him more for it.

You could say that Amazon and Bitbucket aren't on the same team, so it's different. But Bitbucket is paying Amazon to perform better just like a football team pays a player to make the team perform better. In other words, based on the concept of a team recruiting players for better team performance, Bitbucket recruits Amazon for better company performance, so they're basically on the same team.

That said, Bitbucket should focus less on singling out Amazon, and focus more on trying to figure out what they could have done better. It's the professional thing to do, and I'll respect them more for it.
Yep, I'm pretty sure it's not exactly 10,000 in all cases. Your complaint is a "gotcha", not a real argument.

Unevidenced? Did you not read the rest of the comments in this thread?

Actually, you're being curiously specific about the strength of the claims. I didn't realize hackernews comments were to be written as peer reviewed journal articles, but I note that your own have not risen to that standard either.

Why don't you respond to my other points?
They claimed in many places that their "pipe" was "maxed out". If the attack was large enough to use up all of their available bandwidth, that should be easily noticeable in any basic bandwidth graphs.
I wasn't joking. I'd love to play any of these guys in foosball. For geeks, foosball is like golf for executives or football for Kennedys. I like how a 20 year old "throwaway line" can still bring us together. The only cheap shot intended here was my bank shot off my opponent's 3 man and into his goal.
Tom, I admire your strength on here during this terrible time. My condolences to you and to Dan's friends and family. A great loss.
IEEE Spectrum: How to Beat Information Overload
Being database agnostic makes as much sense as trying to write code that compiles in both C and Java.

Maybe if you are writing the realtime transaction processing system for Visa... but this is a CMS. Flexibility is more important than absolute speed. 99% of page views are going to be served from the cache.
I definitely agree - and really, I want my statement to be falsified, since it will be so much worse for it to be confirmed.
There wasn't? There's been an illegal immigration problem in the States since we started clamping down on immigration. There was a large problem with Chinese immigrants in the late 1800's, early 1900's. In fact, El Paso (my hometown) was a focal point of that as well.

For a large part of the history of El Paso, Juarez (our sister city across the border) and El Paso flowed naturally. There wasn't really much of a divide between the two cities, up until the 1920's when a fear of lice caused Mayor Tom Lea to cut back on immigration which eventually spawned the Bath Riots. Even still, it wasn't really difficult to get into El Paso as a Hispanic individual. You simply had to go through a delousing process (designs of which Hitler used to exterminate the Jews) that sprayed you with Zyklon B and steam bathed your clothing. Not exactly the most honoring thing to go through, but you were still permitted access afterwards.

You could say there was even illegal immigration starting during the Mexican revolution when the States became a launching point for some of the revolutionaries. The U.S. still had this idea of neutrality and wanted those people to stay out. They came in anyway.

Flash forward to the WWII era and you have a program (I forget the name) that brought in Mexican citizens to work in the U.S.

So...you saying that there wasn't a problem until the 60's is simply misguided on one hand (there wasn't a problem because a lot of people were largely encouraged, or at least not stopped, from coming in) or horribly wrong on the other (there's been illegal immigration in this country since the quota system was introduced).

Like I said, you sound like someone who doesn't know jack about this subject. You're obviously entitled to your opinions, but your opinions are still wrong.
> When's the last time an update-to-date Drupal site was hacked?

When was the last time that people had an easy enough time of keeping their drupal sites up-to-date with the latest patches without breaking their existing site ?

This is a major and often overlooked problem, it really isn't rare for minor (often security related) upgrades to break the site. You then have two choices, dig in (which is what you should do) or roll back (which is what plenty of people do) and cross your fingers.

Sure, they only have themselves to blame. But still, the number of out-of-date drupal sites out there is very large.

If the upgrade process (and imo that's drupals achilles heel) would be smoother a lot of these headaches would go away.
I'm not sure if it's still true for Windows 7, but I remember that XP also used some BSD code in the network stack. The challenge shouldn't really be eye opening. Free working code will make its way into many pieces of software.

Your second challenge is more interesting, as it may illustrate the effect of using more restrictive copyleft licensing in terms of code reuse.
Thanks for the advice jacquesm, i´m going to study everything deep before asking new questions.
Multicast UDP is so easy that it has never successfully been deployed at Internet scale.
How is this a challenge? I've microsoft free for a few years. As mentioned above, the challenge would be no google software.
The civil war was about the cessation of the south, largely due to Northern economic and political domination of the South. Sure, slavery contributed to that, just as terrorism contributed to the war in Iraq.
I have a lot of material written but have never formally performed. It's on my to-do list.
As a transplant to California for 2 years now, grimly apocalyptic articles like this make me question staying. Thanks kevbin for framing California's Boom & Bust problem as actually defining the state through history. Perhaps being able to structurally and culturally handle endless Boom & Bust cycles make California a stronger state! You've got to love counter-intuition...
"I'm not convinced that there are indeed 27 million people.." There are billions of people in the world. Billions. Think about that for a minute and let it sink in.
The Secret to Github at work
Introducing iMessenger. The first real iPhone to iPhone messaging client.
So, two people of equal intelligence, insight about automation, wealth, etc. are in a field...who is more successful? The one who works 10 hours a week or the one who works 70?

As I've pointed out elsewhere, the stories of great things being done by workaholics are absolutely overwhelming. Warren Buffett, Edison, Franklin, Jefferson, Einstein, Carmack ad nauseaum.

That's anecdotal, but then you dismiss the science behind long, targeted training to become good at things elsewhere in this forum.

I really hope that other folks don't use the current voting pattern in this thread as evidence that doing more work isn't helpful. Trust me (or don't), other people in your field are smart. They are automating tasks, etc. Working more is a battle-tested method of gaining an advantage (or at least staying even in fields where everyone is working as hard as they can).
Some of the situations described sound absolutely terrible. While we're on the subject, though, I want to point out that slavery is a spectrum, not a binary condition.

I don't doubt his number, 27 million, for a certain cutoff point of who is considered a slave and who isn't. If you move the cutoff around, though, you can truthfully say there are billions of slaves, or maybe even zero.
I was talking more about general audience. I understand that people who read SciAm won't magically switch to the Twitter and YouTube videos as their main media for public discourse.

P.S. Not related to the main topic, but you might find it interesting. For the past few months I was reading books exclusively on Kindle but recently I had to buy a paper book (Coders At Work) and the experience is awful so far. I can't highlight and save quotes I like, I can't make notes, I can't quickly look up a word definition. But the worst part is that with Kindle I forgot how difficult and almost impossible it is to read while standing in the train or laying in bed. So, although Coders At Work is a very interesting book I can't wait to finish it and return to my ebook reader.
good summary. Unfortunately, for Dave, noone would have paid any attention if he had written something so short and clear it could be sent through twitter.
Hey Yannis,

Awesome idea.

I've had a look at the basics in drupal, here is a minimum I think to be able to be functional and get to the 50% mark:

A framework-and-module loader.

Template hooks.

Url parser and dispatcher.

Database abstraction layer allowing for at least postgres and mysql.

The following modules:

aggregator

block

blog

blogapi

book

cck

comment

i18n

locale

menu

node

path

path_redirect

profile

taxonomy

upload

user

If, after 1.5 days there is still time left over maybe some documentation ?

Please understand, I'm no great fan of drupal, having seen altogether too much of it, but to say out loud that you can duplicate this in a couple of days is really ballsy, and I for one would very much like to see this succeed or be put to rest. (I really doubt it can be done, even in a multiple of that time, but hey, maybe miracles do happen and maybe a true guru is able to do such a thing on such a timescale).

Edit: I dropped search, calendar and contact, search can be done outside of the 'core', calendar is optional and contact can be done with a simple 'node'.
HN top-100 sorted by karma per day
Why women dominate social networking
sounds like a super fun programming project. one of his other projects, musical chess, is cool, too:
http://www.krazydad.com/blog/2009/05/musical-chess/
... says the Executive Director of the Nevada Press Association.
Neither of them seem to realize or explain why flipping has actually become so common despite its questionable track record on actual value creation.
I'm speaking from personal experience. I had ADD and didn't know about it when I applied to schools.
There are two issues here: What you should tell yourself and what actually is.

I read a sports psychology textbook which quoted a study or studies showing that folks who concentrated on improving themselves and not worrying about the competition were winners. A long distance runner should care most about beating their own time.

But note that in focusing on themselves, they end up winning.

There are many areas of human effort. Some are more competitive than others. The post that this one claims to be refuting was specifically about competitive fields.

Surely we can agree that some fields are competitive? Then the question is, in these fields, where winners abound (people focusing on their own efforts), are outcomes actually improved by the principal or executive investing more work.

Although the voting patterns in this forum don't appear to agree, this is basically settled both in science and commonsense.

It almost appears that people are conflating the issue of whether it's a good idea from a quality of life perspective with whether it works. Those are separate issues.
For me the point where drupal starts to suck is when the core + modules won't do the job. As soon as you start getting into CCK, Views, etc. you're skating on the edge of real development, without any of the tools that make that productive. Writing PHP code in a textarea is not my idea of a good time. And if you have more than one "developer" working on it, fugehtaboutit. With so much stored in the database, synchronizing changes among various developers is nigh on impossible.
Very nice event, hope more coming soon.
For those not familiar with the Polywell design, it's a refinement of the slightly more well-known Farnsworth Fusor. The fusor design is surprisingly simple; small versions can be (and have been) constructed by hobbyists that will successfully fuse hydrogen.

Unfortunately, the fusor has serious drawbacks--probably unsurmountable--that make it impossible to get net energy output from the device, though it does function competently as a portable neutron source.

The fusor design (as well as the polywell, in a modified fashion) differs from conventional approaches to fusion, in that it uses concentric, spherical mesh electrodes in a vacuum chamber with an enormous voltage between them. Positively-charged ions are accelerated toward the center of the device by the interior, negative electrode; any that pass through are repelled by the outer electrode, so ions oscillate through the center of the device at very high speeds until either striking and fusing with another ion or impacting an electrode.

The more sophisticated polywell design uses a form of magnetic confinement to trap electrons in the center of the device, creating a "virtual electrode" and reducing losses from ions impacting electrodes. Unlike the fusor, there don't seem to thus far be any significant theoretical barriers to net energy gain from the polywell design. The main issue limiting further development of the polywell concept has generally been a lack of attention and funding needed to develop and engineer larger and more refined versions.

In short, this is excellent news.
Yes, I ignored the bell curve due to the nature of the site - should have made that clear.

There's not much point even taking that into account for a read-only affair like SO at such a small scale because the cache is doing the work here and that won't sweat even under 100 or 500 reqs/sec.

Anyways, you point out correctly that discussing scaling-issues is rather fruitless without taking all variables into account. I was just trying to say that "SO (in particular) is handling 1mio reqs/day" does not tell much about the performance of the underlying stack.
It's easy to charge for high-quality national news. In America, there are basically three sources of this: The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. If all three start charging for news that can only be found in those publications, they'll be fine. Cable news websites don't currently offer the same quality of news as those three do, and function more as of a competitor to USA Today.

Local news is where things get more complicated. Local newspapers have plenty of competition from TV station websites that suck, but probably don't suck enough to make people want to pay for news. Most papers have already stripped themselves so thin that they don't offer much more than aggregated bloggers and press releases could. In-depth journalism has been relegated to the alt-weeklies. I think there are several ways local newspapers could make more money online, but they seem more interested in laying off people to cut costs than figuring out how they're going to survive.
I'm coming in from out of town on Saturday for this if anyone wants to get together - HN Meetup? Somebody mentioned in the other thread meeting up Monday morning before the event, but how about Saturday or Sunday night for sharing some beers/ideas?
That's as good an ad for the kindle as I've seen to date :)

Not sure how well they work in Europe though, I'll have to look in to that.
I have written tons of stuff and performed at parties, but I still haven't gone to an open mike. Probably for the same reason that I still don't blog. Once I bust either of those cherries, I'll probably become addicted and never want to do anything else.

I learned a little about the stand-up business and it ain't pretty. Most shows have 3 acts, opener (~15 min.), feature (~30 min.) and headliner (~60 min.). The pay is horrible ($50 to $300 for the night), you have to work your way up from opener to feature to headliner, and the hours suck. Also, it would be hard to do much else because you're always driving from gig to gig. Oddly, the feature may be the best gig because the opener (who is usually also the mc) and the headliner have to stay til the end of the night.

It's also a tough life. No matter how good you are, there are always plenty who are better. Your material will probably get stolen, you'll survive on bar food and alchohol, and you'll have as many highs and lows as a startup, but with (believe it or not) a lower probability of big success.

But it still sounds like fun and feels compelling. Maybe one of these days I'll go to an open mike.

My favorites have always been the "joke tellers", Rodney Dangerfield and Joan Rivers.
GPipe: A functional graphics API for programmable GPUs
Someday soon we're going to reach the end-game: ad-blocking will become ubiquitous in browsers, and this long, strange nightmare of "free" content and "zero marginal costs" will have to yield to the simple reality that content costs money to produce.

Which doesn't actually address the problem of getting any significant number of people to willingly pay for it.

It's entirely possible that the end game will not be "oh well, time to pay for content again", but rather "remember the good old days, when content actually existed?"
The radiation dose to Formula One team members
I don't remember if I originally saw this, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feabd... on here but its about Norway's very well run state owned oil company. It unlike Mexico removes the direct control of politicians over the profits so they are more wisely spent over time. As a result Norway is one of the leaders in the world in deep water drilling technology.
Apple challenges new Woolworths logo
A few people are still having problems. But it worked on my iPhone 3G first gen. Thanks Matt Colyer and devs.

From the dev site:

the iPhone uses a proprietary database format to store song information and playlists, simply copying extra music to the iPhone's filesystem without updating this database will not work. `libgpod (svn)` and `gtkpod` can be used to update and re-sign the song database and make new music show up on players using firmware versions up to 1.3.

http://matt.colyer.name/projects/iphone-linux/index.php?titl...
California will ultimately pull out of this situation. The question is how long will it take, and how much pain will people have to endure before things get better.

As Entrepreneurs we hold part of the key to better times through the development of our businesses. The other side of the equation is for the most part out of our hands. Things such as the state passing a worldwide gross receipts tax and other similar actions that in the past have served to cool businesses interest in the state must bear some of the blame for this current problem.

I sincerely hope that this problem is short lived, and that Governor Schwarzenegger and the California legislature solve this problem ASAP for the benefit of all of us.
can't believe you said my name. really? thanks alot. means tons.
Ask HN: Are any of you into blackjack "hacking"?
There was a fellow in the AMA subreddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9qrr3/i_am_a_professional_card_counter_amaa/) that claimed he was able to earn 72k per year by traveling around the world and counting cards for 10 hours a day. Presumably, the scheme would be more profitable with a team.

If you bring your co-founders and a few laptops, this may be the most fun seed funding program possible: YCombinator with rolls of cash, sex, danger and intrigue.
Injunction by Twitter: Stopping a Web Impostor
Many wish for copyright reform, but I sometimes think trademark reform (taking out the vigorously defend clause) might be needed more.
Until I read this I had never even realised that the Woolworths logo was in the shape of an apple, and they are my local supermarket.