skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not really - you get a visa (which is a relatively plainless process), and when you actually land there is almost no paperwork. And you can bet that for all athletes and associated media/staff, the Chinese would either waive the visa requirement or make it ridiculously easy (you can change things on-the-fly like that when you're in a one-party state).

The US, on the other hand, is remarkably difficult to get permission to enter if you're not American. Getting appropriate visas takes some time and a lot of paperwork/documentation, and when you physically land at the airport you're photographed, fingerprinted, and questioned. While I bet the organizers would have found some way to simplify the process a bit, you can bet that they wouldn't have the ability to do a wholesale re-write of immigration laws like the Chinese did (or like the Russians do whenever they host major international events).

As for the IOC members not seeing it, don't forget that many of them come from smaller foreign countries that US immigration is traditionally very skeptical of. They may have had their visa applications completed and expedited by the Chicago organizers, but they still would have been in the same lines as everyone else upon landing, and would have read the same instructions that talk about the various forms you need.
There's almost no possibility it was accidental. I know it's impossible to stomach and the mind has the find a pattern or assign a reason when facts seem to "not add up".

Everyone wants to ask these questions, so I don't fault you for asking.
I am very sorry, both for your loss and for the fact that I never had a chance to know Dan.
I didn't say it's not possible to write bad code in other languages. I was refering to 'there's more than one way to do it', which allows more freedom to screw up.

I think there's a reason that Perl is still the number one scripting language, and it's good to see that development on it is still progressing.
I try this sometimes, often people get mad at me for suggesting that my site might help them. I try to be upfront about being the creator, but people still seem to have a problem with people who own things "hocking" them in niche sites.
I voted it down because it smelled of HN disease, aka, assuming that because you're really good with computers, you're really good at everything else.
A Digital Technique for Art Authentication [pdf]
Yes it is. Nobody ever promised that being a good friend would always be easy.
Thanks for the links. IMHO artists have tried for centuries to capture 'moods' with colour and they did a much better job that I could ever do.

Kandinsky's book is interesting even if what he is saying is mostly metaphorical. However, some of his observations were spot on as that of describing the case of the German patient with color synesthesia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapheme-color_synesthesia

Fascinating topic!
Reminds me a bit of Ettore:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ettore_Perazzoli
Wow I still have not come to terms with this. I whole heartedly agree with Jeremy's comment. He was one of the first people I met in the YC Summer 08 batch and I could feel the excitement & passion oozing out of him. Always quick to help a person out in whatever capacity he could, encouraging and lively, he was truly a stand up guy and will be missed.
Unfortunately, the way I found him pretty much rules that out. I'm foregoing description to be kind to family and friends, but it wasn't something you accidently do. A couple minor things he did directly beforehand which would seem completely innocuous to everybody but me also gives me confidence in the conclusion.
This kind of over-simplification of complex issues really doesn't do anyone any favours, even if it's supposed to be satire or humour (which I can't be sure about in this case). Technology has _always_ provided a platform for art - where do you think those guitars come from, or the paper you write on, or the paints that people used to paint on cave walls if we want to go back as far as we can?

People develop new things that can be used in various ways. Some of the ways are prosaic, some are creative. Someone develops a computer, and one person uses it to solve an equation, another uses it to create a digital painting - both of these things are both technical and creative. And as technology develops, it becomes more and more accessible to more and more people. I can use a piece of paper without understnading how it was made, just as I can use Photoshop without understanding the mathematics of its underlying algorithms.

This piece seems to spring from the same the-internet-is-killing-journalism mentality that has become more prevalent in recent times. Traditional journalism would be on much safer ground if it wasn't producing this kind of rubbish in a mainstream international broadsheet.
From equating downloading to stealing to praising Lord Mandelson and his guilty-before-proven-innocent approach to copyright to the anti-technology sentiment, this seems like an article written by the RIAA (or local equivalent).
This is very sad. Deepest condolences to his family and friends. Really makes the poll that was done only a few days ago more brutally shocking: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=849650

Sometimes it's really difficult to ask for help. Building a support network is one of those paradoxical things... if you don't have one already it makes it even more difficult to build one. And for some people (as it appears in the case of Dan), the saddest thing is that it may not even matter making it worse for those left behind.
So, we've finally found where the women are online?
There was an article recently about John Ogbu, either on HN or reddit. Can't find the same source, but from a bit of googling: http://www.ogbu.com/. Main point: black children tend to be behind at school because the home and peer culture is at least not supportive, and at worst against education.
I really don't think article is meant to be taken very seriously. I mean dividing society into three powers, the footballers, the artists and the nerds... is not a sociological theory that anyone is going to defend without the aid of several pints of beer. And I'm sure that the author realizes that top sportsmen were highly revered in the 70s (even if in the UK there were more big-name cricketers and rugby players and less celebrity footballers) and that 'creative types' still get plenty of cultural kudos today (which has never been the same thing as easy money).

The only elements of seriousness I can detect are in the snipe at pirates and the allusion to the struggles of the creative industries, but I think there are genuinely two sides to those stories so I find it hard to get worked up it.
I've wondered a similar thing for my country, but it was more out of curiosity, since I almost always encounter very friendly customs people (most end the encounter with a "Welcome home!" if you have a Canadian passport, which I really like for some reason).

So I asked a friend of mine who's a customs officer.

He said that if you're a citizen, they pretty much have to let you into the country - but they don't have to make it easy. You can still be flagged for a hand-search of your baggage, interview/interrogation, and detention/seizure in the lead-up to either of the first two (even if you're a citizen, you still need to follow customs law). You can also be detained if they think the passport is fraudulent, but it's unlikely you'd be deported.

Bottom line is that if you're an asshole to the customs officer, they can flag you to have your bag hand-searched, have a few fines issued against you (customs law is so complex that almost everyone violates some small portion of it), and place a note in your file that will make this always happen.
Swing is a bit over-engineered, which makes it a somewhat cumbersome for simple projects but I'm not at all surprised it proves to be powerful in large ones.
Help - I'm drowning in Gmail
I use Google apps. Have so much work-related emails coming through (founder in startup) from so many sources, am drowning in keeping track, responding, creating to-dos. Have a Mac. Any suggestions, best-practices, or tools? Thanks.
Searchyc.com down again?
I've checked with

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://searchyc.com/

and it seems to be down again.
I usually consider the psychology of the colors I use, especially from the point of view of whether or not I am designing a commercial site. In addition it is important to consider the age group of your website visitors.

I've written an article about my take on color psychology in web pages:

http://experimentgarden.blogspot.com/2009/06/psychology-of-c...
A little SEO is worth it, whether or not you know what you're doing. You can read the free stuff on SEOMoz to get a good idea of best practices.

Essentially, SEO is a way to showcase your content so it's more obvious to search engines that your site is about whatever it's about. That means:

* Fresh content.
* Titles and subtitles relevant to what you're talking about (no "mystery meat" headlines -- if you're writing about website usability, say "Website usability," not "The business mistake that could cost your customers").
* A reasonable amount of self-promotion: if you know what you've written could help someone, tell them so; if you see a blog that you like, ask to write a guest post.
* In every online interaction, make sure people see that you know what you're talking about -- and make it clear that for the good stuff, they have to pay.

I write a blog about SEO copywriting: http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/ Read it for more.
He mentions, advertisers don't believe its worth advertising to smart people because they don't make decisions based on brand, but rather they make decisions based on research.

Interesting and true.
I'd like to note that those are two different adjustments. The claim is that pilots adjust the mix of fresh and recirculated air. The author is talking about adjusting the incoming flow volume of new air. Airplanes don't have "recirculate" the way a car does for max A/C, and so to talk about the mixture of fresh/recirc air is meaningless.

All those little air valves above the seats in a plane are letting in only conditioned air newly drawn from the atmosphere through the engines, with no recirculated air mixed in. The pilot can change the total amount of new air coming in, but that's not the same as somehow making only 20% of that incoming flow fresh air. The only place the air already in the plane is going is straight overboard, through valves run by the pressure controller.

(I'd also point out that the fuel savings from a low-flow setting will be minimal, because modern large high-bypass turbofan engines can bleed a LOT of air without much of a performance cost. The bigger the airplane and its engines, the smaller the savings.)
Thanks for those words. I don't know at what point a person actually goes through with suicidal thoughts. I suspect they don't either. If you even suspect someone has them, pay attention, be a friend even if you do not know them well and let them know you will not let them out of your sight until they are over this period in their lives.
Very sad to hear. My heartfelt condolences.

Indeed, the world is a poorer place without him.
I just shared some photos from the summer with Dan on my blog. I am just so freaking shattered thinking about how that was just a year ago, and now this.

http://garry.posterous.com/dan-haubert-1984-2009-we-will-mis...
See "The Paradox of Choice":

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/19/the-paradox-of-cho...

http://journal.dedasys.com/2006/02/18/maximizers-satisficers...
I started reading HN years ago and I always saw a user by the name of fallentimes posting really insightful comments. Through his threads, I found out a lot about he thought through startups, biz, PR...you name it. I learned a lot from him.

We exchanged IMs and emails about little things like TS' press in the FT and how it came about or help with my HN password. I was planning on going to Boston to see my girlfriend's sister and was hoping to meet him in person.

My heart and condolences go out to his friends and family. Tom, be strong - you have all our support and best wishes.
Yes, you can use google site:news.ycombinator.com [yourquery]

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com

as a backup.
You're absolutely right that the cloud is not magic, but you do get some guarantees with EBS. From their website:

"Each storage volume is automatically replicated within the same Availability Zone. This prevents data loss due to failure of any single hardware component."

We don't keep the database on the same EBS, and we have segmented database traffic out to several EBS volumes (for WAL, etc.) That's not the issue.

We take regular snapshot backups. We didn't lose any data. We have everything, we just can't get to it.

Regardless of what might make sense in this situation, it's not working for us. We've moved both our instances and the volumes to different availability zones, to no avail.

I just received a call from AWS engineering, assuring us that we are currently their top priority, and a team of engineers are working to fix the problem. They're seeing the issue on their end, and fortunately for them, it seems rather isolated to our instance.

Could we have taken precautions to prevent this problem? Maybe. We hadn't, cause we didn't anticipate a problem as exotic as this one. The only way to keep persistent data on EC2 is using EBS, and right now, it doesn't work for us, at all. This is not a common problem that could've been solved with backups or snapshots, or whatever.
I have a set of roughly two dozen labels, color coded for groups (i.e. mailing list, financial mail, online services, etc) and a set of filters that redirects all mail to their respective label, skipping the Inbox. I usually filter based on the 'From' field. (Partial screen shot: http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/2189/screenshot20091003at62...)

Enable Gmail shortcuts, learn them and love to use them. Also, enable the 'gl' shortcut in the Labs page again (gl = go label.). They will make your life a lot easier, and I can't stress this enough. E.g., to go to label 'llvm-dev' and mark everything read, I just type: "glvm-d" (it maches on substrings) and then just "*uI" (select unread, mark read).

For to-dos, I use Gmail's Tasks feature (look for it in Labs settings). Shortcut "gk" goes to it and I can quickly add a to-do.

The idea is, only personal email should ever reach your Inbox. And once it does, I usually Archive it as soon as I'm done tending to it. I'm sure there are more things that I don't consciously think about and are muscle memory by now, but those features I find myself unable to live without.
"Everything fails occassionally. Amazon probably ..."

I wish I could use that line to explain to my company why our business has come to a complete halt.

Granted, your business is completely web-based and in the cloud, which is why I specifically made a mention to system admins why the cloud is not reliable enough to be a high-level tier of storage yet. Why doesn't that make sense? I wasn't trying to offend you or your decisions.

Also, yes, my company and my SAN supplier would have staff on-site. But we have control over our own hardware, so there's really no comparison.
yup. this is so Les Miserables ...
I think that happened in the 90s. :)
For the PageRank part, I'd expect the previous solution to make a great seed to iteratively solve on the updated dataset.

I've seen some ideas about incremental mapreduce batted around and apparently implemented: http://www.google.com/search?q=incremental+mapreduce
When this sort of thing happens, it's very easy to point out all the things you should've done differently. In retrospect, everything's easier.

You can't anticipate everything, and as I've pointed out in another comment here, this one is rather exotic.

Quick summary of what the problem is: We have an EBS volume. It mounts fine, appears fine. The problem is that it's excruciatingly slow. We can't serve data from the volume at any speed, really. Running an "ls" takes over a minute, in a small directory.

All systems are running, everything should be fine, but seeing as we can't read the data fast enough, we've been forced to put a static page explaining what's going on.

Booting a new instance, re-creating the volume from a recent snapshot, doesn't help. The exact same problem persists. Why? We don't know. Amazon's figuring it out.

We're doing everything we can do remedy the problem, but unfortunately right now, that consists of our team drinking coffee to not fall asleep, waiting for the final call from Amazon telling us they've sorted it out.
A REAL business, such as twitter or facebook creates an ecosystem around it

:s/REAL/big

It's called an ecosystem because of the web of interdependencies. If it makes money, it's a business.

Biologists define an organism as a "thing that eats, poops and reproduces." Let's just define a business as "a thing that eats resources and poops profits".

In which case, businesses that are "just features" certainly count as businesses. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut_flora
No, that's a straw man argument and I suspect you know that.

RIM "syncs" with iTunes using a standalone program. It is harder to provide an excellent user experience with two programs than with one, but it is doable.

Palm is free-riding on Apple's software, and whatever you may think of that, they are also providing their users with an unreliable user experience that they have no business advertising as a key feature. They're also putting in lots of effort to do that, effort which could be spent on a seamless iTunes sync that didn't rely on USB hackery.
I think the iPhone and iTMS is the best example of this. If I'm not wrong (and I could be), I thought Zynga was processing payment information on their own servers.
Are you a GTD guy?
>The only way to keep persistent data on EC2 is using EBS, and right now, it doesn't work for us, at all.

S3 should work too? Unless it was a global EBS failure, you should be able to restore from any backup to a new set of instances and stores, why doesn't that work?
He uses Bayesian methods in some cases, and non-Bayesian method in others. For instance on page 1412 he describes a problem for which Bayesian methods are "not appropriate."
http://omega.albany.edu:8008/ETJ-PS/cc14g.ps

This is a bit of an anathema to purist Bayesians like Radford Neal who say that Jaynes Maximum Entropy method is not consistent with Bayesian methods and that it "doesn't make any sense"

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.stat.consult/msg/2cf57ceb...
I was referring to GUI of Visual Studio - but thanks for the clarification. I didn't mean to imply MS replaced 30 years of code in one go. I should've written more carefully.
We do the same thing with Emacs and SLIME, though we are transitioning to Rudel for most of our work: http://technomancy.us/129
The free advertising this generates probably earns more than the engineering time costs.
IP protection expert system
1) Where to get a standard confidentiality agreement freely;
2) How to search for a patent & considerations for patentability of an invention (along with other issues);
3) Trade Mark considerations, &
4) Confidential Information issues.
Ask HN: Browsers Crashed When Streaming from Netflix
I was trying to stream movies from Netflix and my browsers (I.E. 8, Firefox 3.5) all crashed on two different PC with Win 7 and XP. Does anybody know how to correct the problem? Thanks!
Judy, an efficient sparse dynamic array implementation
virb has horrible design though. The exact opposite of artful well thought out design. Pastels and rounded buttons do not make "design".

Restraint would be writing fewer blog posts, thinking more. When you have a careful, tested, well thought out idea, presenting that to the world.
JTemplates – jQuery Template Engine
Check out The Web Startup Success Guide [http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430219858]. There's a good section on productivity tools & an interview with David Allen [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done]...
You're way off here.

The article suggests that the workaround took ~40 hours.

Plus, it's not just "free-riding" on Apple's software, it's using Apple's music distribution hub.

You may be thinking it's as simple as writing a winamp skin and having a "PalmTunes" installer disc come with each Pre, but it's not...
We shared a few lunches in Cambridge, as well as more than a few emails about business-guy strategery. There are so many impressive YC startup founders, but Dan had a remarkable x-factor that one sees in successful entrepreneurs without any of the arrogance, avarice, or powerhunger that so often accompanies this talent.

We only knew each other through a shared investor [YC], yet I very much wanted to see him succeed, and believed would - something most people must have felt upon meeting him.

We were all looking forward to watching him have a long and fruitful career.

As PG said, the world is indeed much poorer without him. Dan's family & friends are in my thoughts.
...As data you can access as a filesystem. S3 is great, but pretending it's a filesystem is going to get you awful performance.

As I said, our data is not lost, we have snapshots and backups, it's sitting right there on the mount, we're just not getting any sort of acceptable throughput. New instances does not fix the problem.

Ironically, we were looking into having S3 as the backend for our data, for scalability/redundancy purposes, but this pretty much puts a stop to that.
Tom Siebel: Opportunities in a post-IT marketplace
Also, Josef Albers and his book Interaction of Color.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Albers
Mozilla Security Blog
My heart goes out to Dan's friends, family, and to Tom.
Yes, I second making extensive use of labels and filters. It's hard to do initially, because you feel like you're spending time without immediate payoff, but it's wonderful to have your email sort itself.

Also, I was trying to wrangle my email a bit earlier this week, and discovered that going from 50 message on the front list to 25, and eliminating the multiple inboxes feature, really made my mailbox a lot less intimidating.
I do use that as a backup, but http://searchyc.com lets me rank things by "relevance" or "recency" (which I suspect is not a word, but should be.) When I'm looking for duplicates, the latter is really useful, and the Google search doesn't give the same facility.

Thanks for the reminder though.
When we had the problem we fixed it by snapshotting the screwed up volume, and creating a new volume from that snap. Did you guys try this?
A curious recent variations is allowing the number of hidden units to be infinite. It was observed that increasing number of hidden units in a two level perceptron reduces the number of local minima encountered during training. Allowing the number of hidden units to be unbounded makes the optimization problem convex http://books.nips.cc/papers/files/nips18/NIPS2005_0583.pdf
Time to get some help. Hire someoone to work 5 hours per week for you. Set up an email for them, and have them answer the low level emails for your company.