skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Again with the uncommented downvotes.

Q: why are so many products in life have so many seemingly pointless variations?
Answer: Capitalism.

Under alternative social structures like communism you tend to get only one option for any particular product as more than one option is wasteful unless it has significant variation in function.
I guess your not wrong; that is how language evolves. However, I prefer precision. The worst offence is the incredible number of people who use "ignorant" as a moniker for "stupid", which is perhaps the most ironic of all mistakes.
I'll try to remember that if I ever become a brilliant investor.
Costs and Startups - Advice for your CFO
I suppose "your" prone to these imprecisions as well? ;)
What really sucks is that a company can just pull money out of your account without your actual consent. As long as this is possible, the scammers will thrive.

Credit card companies and telcos should get their act together and stop this. No more handling your wallet to the vendors.
Then thunk is also the past form of thank. What's the past tense form of "The weight thunk to the floor"? I think it will be harder to learn, even given the exceptions, if we remove the common stem from all verbs and their past participles.

Worth thinking about though.
I understand it was meant as metaphor, but the idea of an IDE and toolchain that could cause millions of people to spontaneously start changing their genetic code is quite amusing :)
Midori UI Stack Design and Implementation
IPhone Apps -- What's on Your First Page?
Also, 'moniker' != 'synonym'
Close to You - Pencil Sketch From Photo
The optimal tour for 24,978 Swedish cities
PostalMethods has an API: http://www.postalmethods.com/postal-api
Did you see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=903589 ?

I'm not familiar with that service btw, just remembered seeing that here a few days ago. I use nagios both at home and at work.
Universities has not existed for more than a few thousand years, so I don't think they could have made much of an impact on the natural selection yet. And I would be surprised if the admittance of female students wasn't quite a recent phenomenon.
It is ironic that you point that out. I would not have corrected him had he misused 'who' (i.e., if he had used it for the objective case) -- that would have been a little 'less wrong' than using the supposedly dated 'whom' for the subjective case, as others have said.

That said, I didn't want to be rude or impolite. To lessen the impact of the statement, as to make it 'just a side note!', I enclosed it in parentheses. But that seems to have done little good, since it has ensued another discussion of its own! Oh well, I hope someone out there maybe learned something interesting. :)

Cheers!
Be sure to remember who said it first ;-)
I've noticed the new layout. I don't like it.

Sure I can use it just fine. But I liked having the option of "feeling lucky" even though I rarely used it.
Be nice to know what he created which the article touts as never been done before. I can't read Japanese.
I use pingdom, it runs on remote servers where locally run systems will fail if your datacenter loses its internet connection etc. Can't fault it but ignore the response times, I think the pingdom servers are just slow ;)
I think so. The big ones I know of being:

- dynamic object oriented (Smalltalk)

- homoiconic for compile-time metaprogramming (Scheme, Lisp)

- dynamic for runtime metaprogramming, like continuations (Scheme, Ruby, Smalltalk)

- functional (Scheme, Haskell)

- strongly typed (Haskell, Scala)

- logical (Prolog)

These are the ones I've come across, but there are more on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_paradigm
Sorry for the misquote.
Youtube becomes a social networking website with 'Find your Friends' new feature
> I wonder if it will spread ...

Nope. The irregular forms are slowly disappearing, the least frequent first. I would give you a citation, but I am supposed to be cleaning out the basement, not surfing HN.
Pingdom - use it on quite a number of projects and they keep adding more data checks around the world making it even better to triangulate back to where and why people are having problems.
http://site24x7.com
Speak for yourself. I care about such things.

Ignorance is not really bliss.
Pingdom here as well. I think it could stand to be quite a bit cheaper but it works well.
Werner Vogels, their CTO seems to think differently: https://twitter.com/Werner/statuses/5345892061
Ericsson Shows Off Its New Spider Computer Concept
I wrote this thing for myself: http://dustin.github.com/whatsup/
mode would more likely be 1. King Soloman might have had 600 partners, but he had many many more soldiers (who probably could have managed the 1 wife)
pingdom too. Mostly for response times, thaat's much more interesting to me than uptime.
CIT Files For Bankruptcy
There are a few companies that do a VoIP -> Skype bridge by scripting the Linux client. In line with your comment an open source client would make that kind of hack more reliable.
Pingdom with email2sms gateway for external/global checks and zabbix for internal checks
Ah, you've reminded me, I meant to include that.

Using information theory and Zipf's Law, the hypothesis is that irregular forms arise provided both that they are shorter, and the verb is common enough to make the gains made outweigh the extra effort in learning the exception. As a result, irregular forms that are falling out of common usage revert to the longer, regular form.

The interesting thing about this alternative regular form is that it's also shorter than the "ED" version. Net result is that more verbs should take this regular form because both forces - shortness and regularity - act in the direction of adoption.

I'll update the musing tomorrow. Thanks.
Here's a nice pdf of the enhancements to the eyebar repairs:

http://baybridgeinfo.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/eyebar_rep...
Hey thanks for the link.
I actually read one other article about the ultimate velocity and whether or not it exists.
http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/548

I left a comment (by Chris C.) about his interpretation of time, but having never finished a class on relativity (yet), I'm hoping some physicist can examine my comment because I seriously did pull most of my conjectures out of my butt while I was writing it. But it makes sense based on what I knew.
http://mon.itor.us/

It sends you an email when a site goes down. The free version pings every 20 minutes or so.
This is a great post. Protecting the modest amount of money we're making now as an early stage start up is extremely important. The one thing this post didn't talk about was why it's so important to be so frugal.
Having financial discipline specifically allows a start up to stay independent in times of difficulty. If we do hit rough times and the revenue dips or stops all together, we need to be able to get back on our feet without having to take on any "I hate this but I need it" work.
We make a point of avoiding red-flag clients, unfavourable RFPs, banner-ads for agencies that don't get technology. I guess my point is, that financial failure isn't what's going to destroy a start up. It's the fact that in times of need start ups tend to lower their standards and accept work that inevitably makes us hate our jobs and quit.
Everything from keeping salaries low, to squeezing money out of hardware, to limiting the amount we spend each month on books, travel, and office supplies helps us build up a war chest for hard times. And the reason the war chest is handy isn't because we need it to survive - getting work isn't that hard - it's because we can wait for the work that we love to do.
"and nobody wants to ssh from a phone anyways."

Really? I got word that my site was down, and was able to shell in and fix it from my G1. Coincidentally, I happened to be at an Android developer meeting at the time.

I'll grant that the G1 (etc.) is a more of a hacker phone than the iPhone, but some of us really do like being able to code up a useful app and drop on our phones or easily share it with others, or VNC to a desktop machine to check something, or ssh somewhere to go a fix.
The other artist didn't say that in the interviews I've read. Do you have a source for that?
I guess the idea is to account for the people who will try to game the system. Hey, it may not be a good idea, but it's unique right?
I have simply setup a closed forum using phpBB and it works pretty well in my case. I can see who logged in, who contributed and forums are something that people are pretty familiar with.

I also like the idea of building a real beta-test community for my products because I found out that there are some people who are really, really good at finding bugs and problems.
I guess the idea is to account for the people who will try to game the system. Hey, it may not be a good idea, but it's unique right?

At least theoretically speaking, if we can model and predict human behavior, then the best way to do it is to let humans behave as naturally as possible, and model a rating system based on that behavior.
Diax's Rake
TweepML is stupid.
Clickable link: http://moniedinterests.com/
Her children. :)
How to turn a man’s voice into a woman’s
There are days I wish I had someone to spoonfeed me applesauce and give me a warm bath, then put me down for a nap. Alas, I can't afford that kind of "nanny"...
Here's a list with a few suggestions:

http://verben.texttheater.de/Englisch
ISP's don't have any vested interest in stopping filesharing. In fact I'm sure many of them would love to have it since its a great reason to use their service.
Oh, I mean that I don't agree that Peter Thiel and his investment group is "equally responsible" for the decay of ethics online because I don't think Peter Thiel believes in money. I'm sure Peter believes YOU believe in money, but he himself probably would prefer a world with some better way of storing and moving wealth ---even if to get that world, he must sponsor companies he himself does not like.

I don't know Peter Thiel; this is what I think from his writing and his past history. PayPal was originally the "new world currency." There is an old PayPal sticker on the pool table that says "PayPal: New World Currency" in Molly's Tavern in Mountain View. I think Peter Thiel and Max Levchin meant that literally... but, then their investors intervened to secure a safer cash exit.

What do you do with your life when almost succeed to make an actual New World Currency... but then people you trusted, they sell you out for millions of the currency that you convinced yourself was a corrupt illusion?
I've got a few users who skype me and e-mail me as soon as the site goes down. Not what you're looking for, but alas, that's what I use for now.
This probably isn't the right place to have the descriptivism vs prescriptivism debate, is it? But historically, English has been whatever people who write and speak English say it is. There ain't no Academie Francaise here...
One thing that I've found is that a change of environment and work helps dramatically. One TED Talk I enjoyed discussed why he tales every 7th year off at his consulting business- It lets him recharge his mental battery of ideas for the next 6.

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/649
I am waiting/hoping for NoScript-like functionality...
not serious. if the courts can't even decide who owns the IP, I doubt the source is going to be free any time soon.
Dog Purchases 5,000 Microsoft Points
I agree, but would add that a frugal company will also beat a less frugal competitor (or potential competitor) - because they can advertise more, pay better etc. And when you are more frugal than your competition, you can win any competition on price, all other things being equal.

I'd also suggest that VC's will always fund a frugal company over their rival(s) - although that's somewhat hypothetical as I've never accepted outside funding.
Link on irregular verb decay:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-486935/How-irregular...
David Brin: Cycles of History
This shouldn't be a surprise for anyone who knows what a gearbox is, should it?
Thoughts on Dynamo's "flawed architecture"
I don't think you realize how offensive your tone is in these posts. You're dismissing huge swaths of human creative and intellectual activity with sarcastic derision. We get that you're not interested in art history, literature, social sciences, etc. Either figure out a way make that point dispassionately, or find something else to talk about, or you're going to make enemies pretty quickly.

(Also, the humanities and social science majors I know are just as down-to-earth and hard working as the science students. They have tremendous skills, albeit different ones; solving tricky differential equations isn't everything in the world.

The problem is not that these graduates are unskilled, but rather that the whole economy has taken a nosedive, and the kinds of jobs they used to take, which required their intellectual skills, just don't exist in their previous numbers. For example, as described in the article, media and advertising are being crushed.)
I think you're missing the fact that Dynamo uses sloppy quorums (see section 4.6 in the paper), i.e. writes don't have to happen on the first N members of the preference list. For example, if W=3 and the first 3 nodes in the preference list are down, the write would be taken by the next 3 nodes in the preference list. Now if the first 3 nodes come back online, the system would be in an inconsistent state.
Does anyone know of a monitor that validates entire pages? I want to make sure that my site was not defaced so I would like to compute and compare hash values for a set of files.
Monadic stack traces that make a lot of sense
Finally, every time [your name] uses Pandora.com, [your name] necessarily makes a separate copy of a song in Random Access Memory, or RAM and on the Hard Disk Drive, or HDD. This is an unlawful copy.

This is so ridiculous it is even not funny.
This is a dangerous approach. Sure, watch your meagre cash resources with eagle eyes, but you should really beware of false economies. Cash is a tight resource for any start-up, but there's one resource that's even tighter: time.

If you have a choice between spending $10 or spending 10 hours, don't be silly. Spend the $10, and keep the 10 hours focused on something that provides more than $10 of value to you (like making a sale).
LKH: the current best-known heuristic for solving large-scale TSP instances
Let's all go shopping, eventually.
Status:declined

http://feedback.uservoice.com/pages/1-general/suggestions/28...
Not according to their own system they can't and it's not up for debate either:

http://feedback.uservoice.com/pages/1-general/suggestions/28...
The Dynamo paper is very information-dense, so you have to do a little reading between the lines. Here's the relevant quote from 4.6:

"Using hinted handoff, Dynamo ensures that the read and write operations are not failed due to temporary node or network failures. Applications that need the highest level of availability can set W to 1, which ensures that a write is accepted as long as a single node in the system has durably written the key it to its local store."

So, if W < N, then N - W writes can be written using hinted handoff to nodes other than the final destination, and forwarded when the natural nodes come back online. BUT the W writes specified by the requested consistency level do have to be to the right nodes or everything falls apart.

This is the implementation that makes the most sense when taken with the rest of the system design, so even though it's not quite spelled out I'm pretty sure that's how it works. (I _am_ sure that's how Cassandra's consistency levels work, as possibly the highest-profile eventually consistent open source database. :)
We use Pingdom also.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/hir...

Decide for yourself if this is ripping off Hirst, or creating a legitimate new work that mocks Hirst and his crowd.

This part is interesting:

"But Hirst's complaint was seen as ironic by some in the art world, given the controversy surrounding the provenance of his skull. Three weeks after the artist unveiled the £50m sculpture, another artist, John LeKay, claimed he had been producing similar jewel-encrusted skulls since 1993."

http://www.johnlekay.com/JohnLeKay.GALLERY.htm

By all accounts it appears that someone is taking the piss out of Hirst, and he's being a dick in response.

At least it's inspired more art:

http://www.redragtoabull.com/acatalog/copy_of_INTRODUCTION_-...
http://wasitup.com
Wolfram seems to reference himself a lot.
I don't think you can consider what goes on in prisons as sex. Most of the time it's rape.

It is interesting to observe how Americans view sex in prison as if it was inevitable. If inmates were raped in my country, there would be an outrage. And the number of rapes in prison here are very close to zero (don't have the stats but I remember reading that it almost never happen). And this is a western European country, so in theory the culture should be relatively comparable.
The downfall of Washington Mutual
With an Amazon shopping cart?
pingdom.com
Thanks for your comments. I am working on the payment system now, I decided to launch the product early and gather some feedback while I'm doing that though. At the moment you can only monitor up to three sites.

The content validation idea is very good thanks.
Corrolary 1: We can never prove that we are not in the Matrix.
Has anybody used http://www.howsthe.com or http://www.aremysitesup.com ?
Hmm. So I've been writing an uptime monitor and this is an interesting idea. How would you update the hash and how would you handle dynamic content? If the service offered this feature via API seems like a lot of work on the user end.
Another article on uncommon verbs becoming regular, and related ideas:

http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/sci-tech/lesser-used-wor...
Don't forget though that spending money costs time. You need to spec, buy, deploy and manage those new servers or employees. And when you decide you need more money to trade for time, you need to pitch, close and maintain the new investor relationship. Of course at that point you're actually trading equity for time.
Pingdom, with NewRelic for more detailed monitoring. That way when a customer emails in with a specific issue we can see what went wrong at a glance.
In boost for US economy, companies spend on equipment
I often click on HN stories through RSS to find the link "[dead]" with no explanation or reason why.
You might like a chapter or two of Marshall Brain's 'Manna'

http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

- set in next year, interestingly :) His other stuff on the left is good, too.
I don't know. I can predict doom, without knowing how it will come about. Nassim Taleb gets away with it, so why not me?

I can only say that these price rises seem artificial, by the reasoning I already mentioned. Artificially high prices == bubble, since artificially high (or low) prices are not sustainable.

I fear the collapse will hurt students. If it collapses like a bubble, than it will bring chaos, which can't be good for anybody, students or universities. As to how exactly, I can only guess. Perhaps everybody tries to do the online thing, which, as others have noted, can never be as good as having a flesh and blood professor. Perhaps it just finally rises to the point that people just can't afford it, and the colleges go bust due to lack of students. Perhaps there's a cultural shift away from the notion that college is the most important thing a person can save 20 years of savings for. I don't know, I just see prices that don't reflect reality and fear the worst.
cloudkick for my slicehost and ec2 instances.
check_http, one of the stock plugins for nagios.
I like those, they feel good somehow. Must be the ancestral Germanic genes' influence. Nice & definite sounding, stronger.

edit: well, a lot of them...
At least credit card companies will refund you when you dispute a charge. The whole 'pay to receive' SMS system is just horrible.
I'm working on http://nimbu.net/ at the moment that does what you're looking for. I've just added twitter alerts too if you use twitter. If you've got anything specific you would want to monitor then please let me know.
Well, there's a real point: there are some contradictions in the original paper. But you can implement it the way you want, because those are only the principles –– and there are lots of different implementations already released, not clones!
Pingdom for site uptime & paging, munin for capacity planning and performance monitoring, and monit for process monitoring.
that would be a cool idea for a longitudinal study: re-survey the sample every year for 10-15 years
Lazy people are compelled to find the easiest way out, but also the simplest and therefore most effective.
Will the Digital Divide Close by Itself?
The ideal customer is someone who pays for a fast connection, and then uses it to check their email once a week.

Lower bandwidth usage leads to more profit for the ISP, since they can get away with overselling their infrastructure. Thus, ISPs do have a vested interest - especially considering that many of them oversell their infrastructure. And if this leads to more people using torrents (because they won't be noticing as many issues, and this will lead to usage getting closer and closer to network capacity), it will cut into profits, and potentially require investments in new infrastructure.
Thanks!

He's coming back to Miami soon (Dec 2-6), so I am going to be getting more shots of his artwork.
Bjarke Ingels: 3 warp-speed architecture tales
You have to bear in mind that many languages have no marking for tense whatever, and English could certainly develop in that direction. The only language (Mandarin) that possibly has more speakers than English has no marking for tense on any of its verbs.
As long as you're persistant and keep iterating, and as long you are perfectly capable of succeeding, then luck will become statistically insignificant with respect to your persistence and as time increases. In other words the longer you keep at it, the less of a factor luck will be.

Luck determines how fast you succeed, or fail, and at which iteration it happens.

If you want to talk about the general trend you can make such a probabilistic claim, like "20% of startups succeed," but it becomes insignificant at the individual level because time spent is variable. You can't give an estimation until you know how much time he/she will keep at it.
Why Twitter “Lists” Change Everything
Is the reason people get away with saying "There's no chrome for mac or linux" that chrome doesn't exist on those platforms but chromium does? I've been using chrome (or chromium, whatever) on linux for about 2.5 months and it's great. I use it on my macbook too and it's also really good. So what gives?
And, the winner of the "most unintentionally ironic" disclaimer on a webpage is:

Important: Mention of third-party websites and products is for informational purposes only and constitutes neither an endorsement nor a recommendation. Apple assumes no responsibility with regard to the selection, performance or use of information or products found at third-party websites. Apple provides this only as a convenience to our users. Apple has not tested the information found on these sites and makes no representations regarding its accuracy or reliability. There are risks inherent in the use of any information or products found on the Internet, and Apple assumes no responsibility in this regard. Please understand that a third-party site is independent from Apple and that Apple has no control over the content on that website. Please contact the vendor for additional information.
"I'd expect the mean man (no pun intended, and excluding those who never reproduce) to have 2-ish wives - that's what the "the average person is descended from twice as many women as men" quote is about."

Surely you mean (ahem) the mean man-who-actually-reproduced.