skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I may be misunderstanding you, but is this loosely correct? It merges the distributed data like git, except in cases where there's a merge conflict, the newer one just wins?

It's certainly hard to come up with hueristics for automated merging in all corner cases, and punting and asking the (likely best-informed) user to merge, as git does, seems like the most practical solution. Unfortunately, automated replication doesn't seem to allow that option.

Am I really off base here?
My biggest complaint with the Kindle was that I bought it right before I went on vacation, and one of the e-books I wanted to read on the road turned out to be unusable because it was produced using really awful OCR. How, and why, would you scan a several-hundred-page technical book and then sell it for close to its print price without some kind of minimal check for accuracy? They went to the trouble of separating the tables and diagrams from the main text, but they didn't notice that every minus sign was replaced with a space, and every colon that was printed in a particular typeface in the original was missing from the e-book. It was a recent book, too, so I'm doubly shocked that the publisher used OCR instead of converting their existing electronic documents into an e-book digitally. That experience convinced me to ditch the Kindle and avoid the early-adopter pains.
The GIMP has a Scheme-based console that would be pretty suited to this sort of thing.
... especially Conde Nast. The advantages to running a media company "at scale" are many. Having a large selection of highly targetable demographics means that the ad sellers have "inventory" to pitch to whatever advertisers they want -- especially if they do things like present aggregate yearly incomes and so forth (which I assume Reddit would inflate.)

On a more important note, I think that they are just trying to bring the worlds of nerds and GQ together to bring about world peace.. ;)
If you have a solid track record in the industry then you don't need a degree. But if you're a wet behind the ears programmer-to-be with no prior job experience then you'll be in a bad position. Exceptional, naturally gifted software engineers in such a position can manage to get by through demonstrating their talent in some way (e.g. contribution to a major open source project, perhaps), but the average developer is at a severe disadvantage compared to his degree holding cohorts.
I second leaving 'magic' at its default.
The problem isn't that Apple isn't paying him. The problem is that the OP set up a limited company then used his personal account. That's very sketchy.
So what I'm getting from this conversation is that you don't own a business, or if you do, you don't invoice. Months is a blink of an eye in receivables/payables terms. Here's a startup lesson for you: if you deal with big companies, factor in enough buffer to survive 6-9 months before getting paid, even when you do things by the book.
.. in which I rehash my theory as to how a federated microblogging network could supplant Twitter, as well as correct the truly puzzling analysis from Erick Schonfeld.
i like: /r/programming /r/gamedev /r/games /r/relationship_advice ;)
You can try before you buy: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11004

Though I'm curious if it's easy to revert back to 2 after installing the trial for 3.
Congrats on the fellowship! Good luck and have fun making a difference with emerging economies.
Having worked in UK Banking I can only suggest you google phrases like eg. 'know your customer KYC regulations' and 'anti-money laundering AML' to see why Apple cannot send, and your bank cannot recieve, funds in the ficticious company name to your non-UK account.
If you try having Apple ammend your company name & location to your own name - that could work. Good luck.
Amazon's 'replication' is not mysql replication though, it is a drbd block level replication and can not be used for scaling reads like normal mysql slaves can be used.
The follow up article to this is:
"I'm 25, not as smart as I thought I was, and stuck in a dead end job."
The Futility of Commenting Code
Nice article, Max. Carl from nGen Works has an interesting post up of late on the same topic:

http://www.ngenworks.com/blog/detail/from_the_archives_chapt...
I'm talking about xkcdsucks.blogspot.com. It is f'ing hilarious. Try starting here:

http://xkcdsucks.blogspot.com/2008/10/frequently-asked-irrit...
3+ months of little-to-no communication, stonewalled by front-line support and having to e-mail sjobs@apple.com before getting any response is "by the book"?

I get the impression that you're arguing (and users are downvoting) from the vantage point that Apple is a reasonable organization. They are most certainly not.

The only organization I know of that beats Apple and the AppStore when it comes to Kafkaesque bureaucracy is US Immigration Services.
Indeed. From the POV of Apple Accounts Payable, it looks like tax evasion and they'd be in a world of shit if they knowingly went along with it.

"This guy in country A sets up a company in country B but wants the payment sent to his personal account and his own bank aren't happy about it", they'll be thinking, "and now he wants payment sent somewhere else again..."

The company I work for does a lot of cross-border financial activity and it's all anonymized - you don't know who your counterparty is and they don't know who you are, we're the middlemen and we take care of everything. Something like this would definitely set our alarm bells ringing.
[2] Obituaries cost a lot to publish...

I just finished reading Life on the Death Beat: A Handbook for Obituary Writers. It's written by three obituarists, for obituarists. (I'm not a journalist or an obituarist.) It's not officially out of print, but the publisher has none on hand and I had to check it out of the library.

It's about the business and practice of the obituary desk. It addresses fact checking, the peculiar difficulties of fact checking with grieving relatives, and the minor disasters that arise from leaving that out. Fascinating book, a peek into a job we probably don't think about.

On that grim note, I can also recommend Obit by Jim Sheeler, one of the co-authors of Death Beat. It's a collection of some of his best obituaries. He wrote for the Denver Post and the recently deceased Rocky Mountain news, among others.
http://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=&daddr=1+Infinite+Loop...
Thanks. I know (from, you know, rereading) that I sound unhinged.

But can I just suggest that this problem is completely intractable? Given the fact that we've accepted the costs of not having cellphones on planes, or listening to our iPods when the plane is landing, or bringing 6 ounces of fluid onto a flight --- given the fact that society and the economy is still functioning given these meaningless and onerous restrictions --- there is simply nothing in it for the government to removing the restrictions.
Behind the scenes: 37Signals's Haystack
Corduroy is used by IT consultants, among others. We're very receptive to feature requests and new ideas from our customers on how to make it fit their business better. Give it a try: http://corduroysite.com/

(Disclaimer: I'm the author)
What I Like About vim
"So if you're conceding this argument"

That would require me to have been actually arguing that argument.

People want security. They will not abandon the desire for security, they will not recontextualize the role of security in their society to your liking. Your only hope is choke down the overweening mania of the security apparatus during periods the public isn't actively panicking.

You point out where security is dumb, inconvenient, and - here's the big point - not making them safer. You prod them out of the cognitive dissonance that keeps them accepting what they already suspect are useless security measures because some authority told them to. You have a hard road ahead of you, but then life is pain.
I think the real subtext here is that it would take an unusually awesome company to resolve a problem like this quickly, and whatever anyone thinks of Apple, when it comes to process they are not unusually awesome.
I agree that it's not easily done. If thinking about the fear abstractly doesn't work (it probably won't), actually allow yourself to imagine/feel the negatives you believe as concretely as possible. I don't see how you can approach knowing what's really going on in your own mind if you're unwilling to observe without trying to suppress and control.

I can accept that reasoning away the specific concerns/self-beliefs isn't always possible. Some things really are hard and require practice, even after obviously buggy internal thoughts (usually exaggeration of the negative consequences you risk by trying) are refuted.
Here's a wacky idea that might work if I understand your story correctly: Can you change your personal legal name to the name of the fake company? I have no idea if that's feasible, legal, possible, what the ramifications are, etc, but I'm assuming that if you did so and had the bank change the name on the account to your new legal name, you could receive payments there, right? Might be worth talking to someone about...
How about opening a US bank account for your old UK business?

Edit: oh, I see in one of your comments that you weren't able to do that because your old UK business wasn't registered.

OK, so as I understand it, Apple owes money to a UK business (that in turn belongs to you), but you can't get the money because your UK business has no bank account and isn't registered.

I wonder if Apple can legally take money that it owes to your UK business and give it to a different business (your US business), even if it wanted to?

I think you need to talk to a lawyer in corporate law, and find out how you get money from your UK business that you have no bank account for and haven't registered.
Great documentation, great software
You have no concept of how true this is, these days I have a good gig at a great company, but there was a time not so long ago when the VC world almost shut down and I found myself out of a job (was an analyst/due diligence guy) and started looking through the intrerwebs for my next 9-5.

Long story short I ended up at a "social marketing firm" which turned out to be one mid thirties bottle blonde woman working out of a home office. The few months I spent working for her were an instruction in the art of selling practically nothing; use buzzwords relentlessly, insist that your marketing efforts "can't be measured" and if all else fails just get a boob job and wear a really low cut blouse.

Instead of hiring a social media expert/consultant/douche just spend the money on coke and whores, the marketing effects will be the same and you'll do less actual damage.
I was thinking of the same thing. What is really needed is a clean group management solution with a nice inviting UI, a good spam filter (something like Akismet) and good access control for various levels of admins. The last would really hit it off with open source projects having a BDFL sorta guy with multiple pillars.

It could even be freemium with free access to public groups involved in open source projects. Maybe even some nice integration with whatever seems logical.
Contact the old bank branch manager and tell him/her your situation. If you've had an account for a while it's likely they'll believe you and might be able to accept the wire on your behalf.
In what way are my users going to notice that I stored a prop table in Redis instead of MySQL? Because I don't think they're going to notice ever, but I could be wrong.
I manage a business, and we do invoice. Like any other business, our customers pay late. What I don't have is individuals who owe us money stonewalling our requests for communication/resolution on a late invoice.
Then I'm going to differentiate between actually being embarrassed and rationally anticipating potential future embarrassment. And I think that's indistinguishable from objecting on principle.
I see this claimed a lot, but never with any actual links. Care to linkify me? (not agreeing/disagreeing)
Good luck with your next endeavors guys. I still remember when kn0thing sent me some free reddit stickers for submitting feedback, back in '06.
Ask HN: What are your favorite brain teasers?
The other day I encountered an interesting problem:
You have two fair, six-sided die with positive-integer-valued faces. You roll the die, and take the sum S of the numbers you roll. S will have some frequency distribution. For standard die, theres 1 way to roll a 2, 2 ways to roll a 3, etc. Are there any other pairs of die (the dice need not be identical) that generate this same frequency distribution?

It turns out this problem has a unique solution, and a nice name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicherman_dice

I encounter pretty cool problems like this on a regular basis, but they are always by way of a random friend or blog post - there doesn't seem to be a good central resource for such things. This may be because any problem that enough people know about is no longer novel or interesting (think of all the tired brainteasers you know of).

Nonetheless, I'd be interested to hear of other peoples' fun brain teasers. What are some of your favorites?
3/4 through this article I started wondering whether this was some kind of Swift-ian satire about the graphic design "spec work" argument. I don't think it is.

Here's the deal: it's called supply and demand. If clients have 10 quality firms to choose from, and they pay their firms enough, then building an excellent RFP is simply going to be the cost of doing business with them.

Sometimes, some firms are so good, and provide output that is so hard to match with any substitutable firm, that they get to set the terms for the client/vendor relationship. Those firms know who they are, because they have waitlists, and are already turning down clients.

If you want to boycott RFPs, by all means, get your lunch eaten by the companies who are willing to throw those two extra non-billable days at the task of making themselves extra easy to work with. But I don't think you're going to manage to demonize the RFP process the way designers have the spec-work process, because RFPs are simply the way consulting works.
Why can't DRBD be used for scaling reads?
Okay, call me cynical, but doesn't this read like an HN version of a 419 scam? It has everything, an "unknown" user account with almost no Karma, the personal appeal, the money in an offshore, specific dollar figures, the temptation to help the person in return for a cut of the money - All with an HN twist (Apple Store acting like a tool).

Sadly, this may all be in the up-and-up, and I'm just biased from years of being exposed to the Intertubes...
I have no intention of asking anyone here for money (for precisely this reason) and will not accept any offers.
We had two of those volunteers when I ran a rather large website. And it was a realy positive experience. We gave them admin rights to subsections of the site (message board, etc.) and they did a really great job.
So no horror stories from me.
What? The systems are entirely different; they aren't designed for the same purpose and they aren't at all interchangeable.
When a Net-30 client takes 6 months to pay you on your 3rd project, they are being worse than Apple: they know how to pay you, they have people assigned to paying you, the process has already worked in the past, and they're simply not paying you.

Here Apple is dealing with someone who basically invented a fictitious company in a different country (! ! !) and is now trying to collect on payables. What do you expect to have happen? I actually believe vessenes --- he may just never get paid. I wish him the best.
Here's haystack.com couple of years back: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://haystack.com

I wonder how much they paid for the domain?
I'm more interested in getting the money out in a timely manner than in borrowing money from anyone. If it came to that, I can ask friends to give me some more money.
I think the OP comes off pretty badly. None of this sounds like Apples fault to me.

When you put in account details, make damn sure everything is exactly as it should be.
You misunderstand. The company is a real UK limited. They can be setup over the internet. It's registered and real. I can setup a company over the internet, but not a bank account.
Try meetups or user's groups for R, SAS, SPSS, data mining, etc. My local R group meetings are really interesting and info-packed.
GMail Can't Read a Period
> because RFPs are simply the way consulting works.

Not all the time. I never respond to public RFPs, and neither does the OP. Apparently in our (separate) niches, you can get by just fine.

Agree with your point about supply and demand, but good hackers are (nearly) always in demand, and so can nearly always find work. It's the strange outsourced companies that spend all their time searching for work that end up responding to RFPs, and that's dangerous even to clients.

Look at it this way: if you have a pool of proposals sitting on your desk, 90% of which are from firms that are simply incapable of doing the job[1], and you are a business/nontechnical chap, it's going to be difficult to find the 10% who are capable, let alone competent.

Meanwhile, technical guys who are good hackers but don't understand this see lots of firms sending out and responding to RFPs and think this is how it works, so I guess we have to do it too.

[1] http://www.elance.com/php/search/main/eolsearch.php?matchTyp...
Sears?
"The temptation to help the person in return for a cut of the money" is not the same as "asking for help and promising a cut of the money". You're seeing intent where none is expressed.

There's no appeal for you to do anything shady or stupid.

Wise up. By posting your rumination, you're casting an unwarranted shadow on the whole situation.
I wonder if diet plays a role. The only way you're getting 20 miles' worth of glycogen is from eating grains- which were domesticated just recently in human history. I'm not sure if that type of glycogen density was available before then. Maybe now we have the luxury of burning up 5kcals for a very long jog, but 100,000 years ago?
Or do the same thing with the link to your 'awesome' blog post... Or change the IP on your domain/subdomain to point somewhere else...
It'd be pretty interesting to do this today. Internet access would negate a lot of the benefits of hermitage, in some respects. But it's a super romantic ideal - and one I [and it seems others] can definitely relate to. A big part of this story is that Lutus didn't go out to the wilderness to work on software, but rather, fell into it through curiosity and excitement over some novel new form of technology.
I don't think that's true for the more powerful high explosives, and even if it is, shit or puke it out in the bathroom and your problem is solved.
Part of McDougall's point in the book is not just that we CAN run long distances but that, over the long term, it's good for us. For most intensive sports, you can only keep up with them for so long before your body starts to wear and tear. Runners (with proper technique, which is encouraged by minimal footwear) remain healthy and effective until old age.

One of the coolest anecdotes from the book: the average performance of marathon runners increases from age 19 to 27, when it reaches its peak. Performance returns to the 19-year-old level at age 64. That's not true for any other sport. (Citation needed, obviously, but I don't have the book handy.)

The book also gives interesting examples of biological traits we possess, such as bone and muscle configurations, that only appear in animals that run a lot. I'm not saying the book is scientifically rigorous or conclusive, just that there's more to it than appears in this article.
Bank Form:

Account Holder:

Account Number:

Routing Code:

I filled out the form correctly. But Apple does not use whatever you specify as "account holder". They use the company name.
This one's my favorite. Good luck. I'll buy a 6-pack for the first person to solve it:

A hundred prisoners are each locked in a room with three pirates, one of whom will walk the plank in the morning. Each prisoner has 10 bottles of wine, one of which has been poisoned; and each pirate has 12 coins, one of which is counterfeit and weighs either more or less than a genuine coin. In the room is a single switch, which the prisoner may either leave as it is, or flip. Before being led into the rooms, the prisoners are all made to wear either a red hat or a blue hat; they can see all the other prisoners' hats, but not their own. Meanwhile, a six-digit prime number of monkeys multiply until their digits reverse, then all have to get across a river using a canoe that can hold at most two monkeys at a time. But half the monkeys always lie and the other half always tell the truth. Given that the Nth prisoner knows that one of the monkeys doesn't know that a pirate doesn't know the product of two numbers between 1 and 100 without knowing that the N+1th prisoner has flipped the switch in his room or not after having determined which bottle of wine was poisoned and what color his hat is, what is the solution to this puzzle?
Tell HN:  Something that bothers me about discussion here.
I'm personally fascinated by debate whether or not the topic is all that reasonable.

Moreover, even if the topic is not all that reasonable now, it may be more reasonable in a decade or two and could be argued in that context.

I suppose others here think differently and don't want to debate anything that is not of practical significance today.
Actually, no, they didn't.

If we believe the official story 100%, then they merely plotted to do so, but never actually attempted it (they did, however, according to the official story, 'smuggle' non-volatile liquids on in a dummy run, without actually risking taking anything they'd be in serious trouble being caught with).

So, the best case scenario is that no-one 'did try just this'.

That's ignoring all the many holes with the case (that ended up requiring using a legal backdoor to convict them without a unanimous verdict.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_plo... has some links in the cites.
Ehh, I think that would be a bad decision on my part. That's selling a birthright for a bowl of soup.
Thanks, and if any of you are on kiva - you'd better friend me ;) I won't hit you up for loans, just tempt you with matching promises.

http://www.kiva.org/lender/kn0thing
Design needed for equipment rental site
Hi there,

Are you looking for freelance design work?

I need a design (with CSS and sample HTML) for my simple equipment rental site. Specifically, I am looking for:
1) CSS for the site
2) Header, footer and a clean, modern logo
3) Clean gateway with a basic search form
4) Products page with images and pricing
5) FAQ and Contact Us pages (trivial)

In return for a link to your portfolio, I can provide screenshots of the current site (ugly, based on free CSS) and a short design brief.

My budget is tight but hopefully realistic for a simple job at £250 ($410).

I am looking for a clean, simple, modern design.

Thanks for your interest!