skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think Malcolm Gladwell talks about this guy a little in Outliers and attributes much of his personality to his upbringing. One might query whether by virtue of being that intelligent, one is already predisposed to isolation and intellectual elitism, but perhaps in this case it is neither here nor there. I have always found (and believe mostly) that brilliant people can describe their ideas (at least generally) in ways us normal knuckle draggers can understand. I would be interested in a capsule summary of CTMU for the common man. However, this intellectual ego-stroking in the videos etc. makes me think Mr. Langan would never so corrupt his lofty ideas.
Your demonstrated antisocial behavior validates the original poster's opinion.

Moreover, how is his opinion of your clear anti-social pretenses an attempt at 'hegemony' (specifically, the dominance of one state/region/political group over the other)? Is it because you feel that you are persecuted as an 'outsider' by the 'normals'? (This is also evidence of a psychological problem. If this is genuinely worrisome to you, you should see a shrink.)
No, sadly, I cannot. My suggestion would be to visit the website. If you do, it is pretty obvious that they're getting quite a bit of traffic.
As it happens, most polygynous societies have much less polygyny than you'd think because the average man can't afford all four wives. I believe the average man throughout history has been a monogynous man living in a polygynous society.
I sincerely doubt that this is true, for a few reasons:

1. Amazon can afford to lose money on AWS for years, while a new company with just $40MM can't.

2. Many of the early adopters using AWS are "rogue developers" within large organizations. A key defense for a strategy like that if you get caught would be that you went with one of the largest, most reliable companies in the industry, as opposed to a small, unproven startup.

3. A small team of very smart, very motivated developers and sysadmins with $40MM would be better off going after a high-margin business where they don't have to compete with three or four of the biggest and most powerful technology companies in the world.

Not saying that there's not room for improvement, or that a startup in this space couldn't do well, but I highly doubt they'd "wipe the floor" with Amazon.
uTP spec: http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0029.html

Previous uTP discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=877510

A more general proposal for controlling Internet congestion: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-moncaster-congestion-exposu...
Some neat ones I've made:

Stackoverflow questions (linear??) http://webnumbr.com/stackoverflow-questions

My twitter followers http://webnumbr.com/ptarjan-twitter-followers

Wii price on amazon http://webnumbr.com/used-wii

Hackernews top scroe http://webnumbr.com/ycombinator-top-score

And any recommendations for the site are welcome too :)
OTOH, http://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2009/papers/hotnets20... suggests that localization doesn't help that much.
A crustacean eye that rivals the best optical equipment
If you only wanted to evaluate their product, why didn't you use the free trial available for download? I just checked that site now for the first time myself and it was pretty obvious how to get one.

Refunds cost time and money to process and are a demoralizing pain in the tail (fwiw, we provide our rarely requested refunds immediately with no hassle and no questions asked) and a purchase with an immediate request for a refund typically screams 'pirate'.

Your opinions seem belligerently set in place, so all I can offer is the Independent Software Developer's Curse: "May you have customers who act just as you do".
You sound like an indulged child, not a misunderstood genius.

I am at the 'upper bounds' as well, but I don't attempt to batter others over the head with my vocabulary and pride, and I've learned that I'm just as vulnerable, alone, and human as anyone else. Setting yourself apart on the basis of a standardized test is just sophomoric justification for misanthropy and depression.
Wrong type of hacker.
Why bother with going back and forth? Just dispute it with Mastercard and move on.
The Steve Rubel Tao of Productivity.
You have a nanny and you're posting on HN? How old are you?
"seeing the constraints are artificial" does not mean "cheating" or using things outside of the constraints. I don't think the winning teams used more than $5 and 2 hours.

It doesn't take much to see that 2 team-hours is a much bigger asset than the $5, so you're better searching for the best way to use 2 hours, and maybe even ignoring the money.

It took a bit more insight to realize that hard to tap advertising space(and other opportuities) in a university town is a much bigger asset than the team-hours and the money.
Ok, I think this is a big point of confusion. A "company" rate is very different than a developer rate. A company rate usually includes project managers, client liaisons, secretaries, etc. I can't imagine an individual developer getting paid $20,000 for one month of 40-hour-per-week iPhone work.

I think it's important that we make this clear to new developers, so thanks for clearing it up.
Historically, maybe it's not so shocking. According to the article below,

Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men...To get that kind of difference, you had to have something like, throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm
I think the real problem with that question is deciding exactly what you mean by "disappear." If you blow the sun up, it still has all its mass, it's just spreading apart, and the effect this has on Earth can be graphed continuously. Likewise if you just move it somewhere else really fast (because you can't move it faster-than-light.) If you convert it completely into energy, by the mass-energy equation, it still has all its mass.

Thinking about gravity becomes a lot simpler when you realize that every one of those particles of the Sun is quantum-entangled with all the particles of the Earth. If you want to "remove" the Sun, you have to decide what that means for the decoherence of the configuration subspace consisting of (what was previously) Sun + Earth.

Configurations only evolve toward more definite subsections of themselves, not completely "new," remote amplitudes. Also, as far as we can tell, decoherence is computable from the completely local neighborhood of the amplitude-mass in question. Thus, gravitational transmission has to take some amount of time, in the same way that one domino can't knock down another across the room instead of going through the dominos in-between.

The interesting thing is that some of the particles of the Earth (analogously, the intermediate dominos) would be immediately affected—but it would take Au/C before enough of them were affected that that decoherence would become detectable.
Awesome, now we can finally get proper support for Skype in FreeSWITCH and Asterisk. Everything up to this point (with the exception of the closed-source Asterisk beta) has been a hack.
Would you say that focusing on programming paradigms, rather than language implementations, would help to counteract this?
It's pretty clear that he ran a search or two and provided the Wikipedia link for clarity.
Nothing is written in stone. People decades ago weren't locking their doors, but factors such as urbanization (with higher crime in cities) created a reality that made people change the way they think. It wouldn't have taken many friends or neighbors having TVs and cars stolen, to make them change their minds. So does it really seem that unlikely that people will not learn from the experiences of being online, and learn the digital equivalent of locking their doors?
I like the way they are spinning this. The new protocol, over UDP, is more difficult for ISPs to throttle without harming everything else on UDP (VoIP, games, streaming video, etc) that people regularly use (AFAIK.)

That being said, they really did create the new protocol to have more elegant throttling. Morris: "It’s not QoS, but rather a congestion management mechanism implemented at the end-user’s layer 7 [Application]. This will stop uTP from eating up traffic bandwidth reserved for latency sensitive apps like VoIP and gaming. What’s more, the congestion management mechanism isn’t something we implemented as an afterthought – it’s the whole point of uTP." from http://torrentfreak.com/utorrent-2-0-to-elimininate-the-need...

Looking forward to it, even though Comcast doesn't seem throttle my BitTorrent traffic at my location (North Bay area.)
Some of the other essays in the competition are worth a look.

http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/category/31416
Who's spinning it that way? I didn't see that in the article. Also, DPI or traffic analysis can easily distinguish different UDP-based protocols.
If you're ever going to grow your beta testing ops, then CenterCode is definitely a good option: http://www.centercode.com/ TiVo uses it for betas...actually, I'm not sure if I can tell you that under NDA :P

For smaller stuff, I'll also recommend Mailchimp for basic mailings. They're here in Atlanta and those guys rock. A killer product from a killer company.
I actually tried this, because I have the problem, and it does not solve the problem on Windows 7. The text is still garbled.
nice how this study remarks on the earlier one about shorter toes being more energy efficient for long distance running.

i look forward to the vertical studies that show whether a regular person who starts sprinting regularly can shorten their tendron, or whether it is entirely genetic. not sure about toes changing lengths,...
It's not required, but if you know what it means, using it allows you to be more eloquent. Shakespeare never put his sub-clauses in any rigid order, but never used commas either—and he got away with it because all these little hinting words in Early Modern allowed him to rearrange the sentence parts without losing any meaning.

It's sort of like type hinting :)
Good idea. For those of us who use an @gmail.com address, here's what you can use in lieu of plus signs, which as JimmyL said often don't work:

Gmail lets you insert periods between the letters of your username. So if my email address is someusername@gmail.com, the following are valid variants of my email address:

some.username@gmail.com

some.user.name@gmail.com

s.omeusername@gmail.com

And so on. So you can use variants for different services you sign up for. Also note that you can substitute @googlemail.com for @gmail.com.
Unofficial Solution: Remove iTunes.
Average = mean, median, or mode? 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. I'd expect the median man to have one wife - that's what your comment is about. I'd expect the modal man to have no wives - after all, if some folks are ending up with the harems, that means a bunch of people with no women at all.
Hacking Language: A New Past Tense
Low margins making this a good fit for Amazon was really a light bulb going off for me. Microsoft, IBM, and even Google hate low margins, but it is inherent to Amazon's other businesses and built into their DNA. Microsoft, specifically, knows that this space is important, but they can't get their heart into it because they know the low margins will eventually have an impact on their other high margin businesses.
just assume -> just as soon
I was wondering if Wolfram's logs would show a bunch of queries for P(gay), P(virgin | gay), and P(virgin | not gay), then realized you'd given them variables. More's the pity. I'd love to see the face of the employee that sees a bunch of queries for P(virgin | gay).
In Europe the protections are better, and there are requirements that must be complied with including no data processing outside of the EEA without consent.

You can read about the UK variant here: http://www.ico.gov.uk/
Responding to Scamville: How offers and product bundling add value
Can an ISP fake a network congestion that uTorrent detects and automatically slows itself? That would be the next logical evolutionary step for people hell-bent on stopping filesharing. That's ISPs, RIAA, etc...
How Facebook could clean up the offers industry
Calling parts of the language you don't happen to use "dead" is dead.

Also, in the real world, the expression "the real world" is a great way to win an argument without saying anything insightful.
Yep, it shouldn't be too difficult to delay uTP traffic and convince it to slow itself down. It's unlikely that ISPs would do that since getting caught would cause another neutrality smackdown from the FCC.
Is that really feasible for ISPs? I know you can traffic shape anything, but would they bother? I remember there was a pretty big ruckus when this was first announced, since many of the uT guys were talking about how it would be much harder to throttle.
It could be that he has children himself, so "his nanny" watches over his children and not over him.
"UserVoice requires creating an account."
Are you sure this isn't an admin setting?
The general argument is against "it's too slow". People avoid FP because "it's too slow" in favor of languges like C that get you the wrong answer really quickly. (Functional programming is not "too slow", of course; consider the popularity of Ruby and realize that SBCL, OCaml, GHC, ... are often 50x faster. Of course, those are all 3x slower than C, so clearly should be avoided...)
I think the result was actually that people on both ends of the bell curve have less sex than people in the middle. More intelligent people tend to be less sexually precocious, but so do less intelligent people.

This sorta makes sense from an assortative-mating POV. People tend to mate with people of roughly equal intelligence. When you get to the outer edge of the bell curve, there're many fewer people of roughly equal intelligence, and you're far less likely to run across them randomly.

Perhaps grad school's real contribution to human science has been the perpetuation of genes for intelligence. Without it and similar institutions, a bright person might never find someone they care enough about to have sex with.
anonymous users can still leave comments and such.
Why not just cut out the whole "teaching" thing and mail the student a diploma based on payment of $70,000 and submission of SAT scores? If you get a 1600, your diploma will say "MIT". If you get a 1400, it will say "University of Illinois", etc.

That will save millions of dollars on writing software for online course administration (and associated support staff). Then the professors can focus on doing free corporate research instead!

And of course, the student is just as prepared for "the real world", and the Universities can build up their billion-dollar endowments and live off the interest. Everybody wins!
Ask HN: What do you use to monitor your websites?
I'm looking for a simple service that sends me an email or text message if a website goes down. Any suggestions?
I came up with the best ideas just talking with friends. I think "evolution is a result of contamination", so the more your thoughts are "contaminated" by conversations with other people, the more are the chances that they sparks into real ideas.
ISPs can, but they can already traffic shape, so that isn't really a weakness. Malicious clients can't because the throttling is done per-socket.
Nagios
and
Monit

Monit after a tip here, great little program.
Google Chrome: The Fast Browser With Slow Adoption
Gnome-Do which in-spite of its name works with both Gnome and KDE is basically a Quicksilver inspired launcher : http://do.davebsd.com/ is the perfect power tool for Linux Desktop users.
Windows 7 Upgrade Woes Mount: Endless Reboots and Product Key Problems
This is crap. 'Thou' is part of a whole class of pronouns (2nd person informal) that are completely absent from all modern speech and writing. 'Whom' is the objective form of 'who'. I/me, he/him, she/her, we/us, they/them, who/whom. It's not used very often in speech, but it's used every day in formal writing and thus very much alive. There is no disagreement among educated speakers of the language as to which usage is correct and which is incorrect, only disagreement as to which is acceptable in context. Celebrating it's death is celebrating ignorance.
To understand the paradox, the researchers set up a computer model of a sprinter’s push-off. The simulation revealed that despite providing a mechanical disadvantage, the short lever arm of a sprinter’s heel actually produced more force than the longer lever arm of a non-sprinter.

Funny how as soon as you discover something, your computer simulations miraculously start to predict it.
Google Plays A Trick With Halloween Logo (Go Try It)
[Disclosure: I used to work at Amazon, but not on Dynamo or Cart, and have no non-public information about those systems.]

I think this is based on a flawed application of metrics from other organizations that do not match Amazon's actual business needs.

The author talks about bank transaction systems with five nines of availability. Sure, you can build a centralized system with a critical core that has near-zero downtime - usually at great operational cost - but there's not a bank in the world that's actually 99.999% available to customers, over the internet. Most retail banks I've used take several hours of outages per month for maintenance on their web services.

Amazon wants its systems not just to keep running but to keep taking orders from millions of people all over the world. This means that they are concerned with the reliability not just of a storage server, but everything needed to connect it to its application servers and to customers. They have found that the cost-effective way to do this is to distribute every component across geographically separated datacenters. Amazon has remained available through real and simulated datacenter-wide outages ranging from power/cooling failures to floods, fire, and hurricanes. No Amazon system lives within a single building, much less a single network switch or rack.

Finally, although the formally provable aspects of Dynamo's "eventual consistency" guarantee may be vague, any team operating a distributed system will study and understand the actual operational characteristics in practice, under both normal conditions and various failure modes. Some systems may have realistic failures that lead to days or hours of inconsistency (in which case the team has deliberately chosen this and will write client software to be aware of it); others might be tuned to achieve consistency within milliseconds under normal operation and to set off alarms within seconds after a failure. I've never known any that would be used in circumstances where "human lifetimes" are a relevant time period.
ISPs can detect BitTorrent traffic today and I don't see why uTP would be any harder to detect than the classic BitTorrent protocol.
I bet he uses a general purpose computer for email, for keeping accounts, etc., just by proxy. That is, he's rich enough that he has other people do the input/output and report back to him.

Doesn't he have a cell-phone, probably a computer; use a PBX, a computer; drive a car, a computer; ride in an elevator, a computer; ...
@Werner: Darn, someone figured out that Dynamo is a flawed architecture. Luckily its only use is storing hundreds of millions of shopping carts :-)
Dynamo is still in use, but as with all technologies that have to operate at Amazon's scale, the systems evolve rapidly. The storage systems in use now no longer look like the ones from 5 years ago when Dynamo was developed.

The Dynamo SOSP paper had two goals: 1) show how systems are a composition of techniques and how all of these need to work together build a production system 2) given that it was based on a variety of research results it was intended to give feedback to the academic community about the difficulties of moving from research results to production, and what matters in real-life vs production.

The paper was never intended to be a complete blueprint for easy design of follow-up systems.There just isn't enough room in an academic paper to do justice to that. If it was going to have any role in that the best we could hope for was as a collection of points you would have to think hard about and make decisions about when you were going to design your own storage engine.

That doesn't means I agree with the conclusions of the analysis, on the contrary, I think they are seriously flawed as well (as with everything else that is not absolutely perfect :-)). But I can understand that when people look for the dynamo paper to be a blueprint that solves all their storage needs and provides a perfect available service under all failure scenarios (and solves world peace), that they may be left with a few questions afterwards.

I always thought that the real contribution of the paper was that it made you think hard about the trade-offs you are faced with when you have to design high-available, ultra-scalable systems that are cost-effective and provide guaranteed performance. 5 years later we know a lot more but this stuff is still hard, and we still need to balance rigorous principles with production magic to make it work. But you do need to fully understand the principles before you can make the production trade offs.

Caveat: some of these remarks were tongue-in-cheek fun; I leave it to the reader which ones :-)
Curius, which one of (Freemind, XMind, Mindjet MindManager, Dropmind, and NovaMind) did you find to be the best for your needs?
I was joking :) Stupid, I know.
Let’s Kill “Viral”: It’s Time For a New Word
you said this is written in PHP -- if you don't have access to your php.ini file, you can put

error_reporting(0);

at the top of the script to prevent warnings from showing up to the user.
Are you sure about the no-attachments thing?

http://groups.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...

You could also use the group's "Files" section to upload files for group users.
I especially like where he says the writer is lazy for expecting him to spend 2 seconds decoding that address.
Basically, the author doesn't understand quorum protocols and draws a bunch of erroneous conclusions because of that.

Here's the core misunderstanding:

"It is hinted that by setting the number of reads (R) and number of writes (W) to be more than the total number of replicas (N) (ie. R+W>N) - one gets consistent data back on reads. This is flat out misleading. On close analysis one observes that there are no barriers to joining a quorum group (for a set of keys). Nodes may fail, miss out on many many updates and then rejoin the cluster - but are admitted back to the quorum group without any resynchronization barrier."

That's because adding a barrier (a) isn't necessary for the consistency guarantee, (b) doesn't add any extra safety in the worst case, and (c) adds complexity (always be suspicious of complexity!)

Consider the simple case of a 3-node cluster (A, B, C) with N=3.

For quorum reads and writes, R = W = 2.

Then reads will be consistent if any two nodes are up. It doesn't matter if nodes A and B are up for the write, then B and C are up for the read -- the reader will still always see the latest write.

Of course you will have to block writes and reads if more than one node is down for either operation. This is what the dynamo paper means when it talks about allowing clients to decide how much availability to trade for consistency.

The rest of the article is basically variations of this theme. (The only way to provide "strong consistency is to read from all the replicas all the time"!? Wrong, wrong, wrong.)
I dont know about 0, for startups. If I came to a page for a new service I hadn't heard of and it looked like THAT, I'd instantly question it, hard.