skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The above post.

I used to think that Dawkins & co's books were just preaching to the choir. Yeah, I found them fun to read and nod along, but I didn't believe they'd change anyone's mind. I assume that this isn't an issue of logic, and when you're not dealing with logic for the most part, no logical argument would be sufficient.

Reading posts like these do make me believe that it's possible to change minds, if people are willing.

(I'm not saying those books aren't useful; they give a sense of legitimacy to those who don't side with religion and this is important.)
Right.

Though, to argue with the article's title -- while a straightforward addition of more memcached nodes did not solve their capacity problem, the strategy of replicating nodes & load balancing read requests between them appears to be a solution to this particular capacity problem; so more machines = more capacity, so long as they are organized appropriately.
Why does th design matter beyond "look at me, I'm using an overpriced collection of stock hardware". It's the old saying "you can't polish a turd". Commodity hardware is always going to be commodity hardware no matter how shiny the case is.
Steven Pinker is amazing. From what I've read from his other articles, books, etc, it's always been enlightening. He also does a beautiful job communicating his ideas.
Clickable http://www.fossfaq.com
Same here, only the other way. After being an atheist my entire life, I got more interested in religion over the past few months. After listening to dozens of hours worth of podcasts, and reading a few books and academic journal articles, I've decided that there is such a thing as a "primary religious experience." Furthermore, it's pretty clear that while academia can verify that this experience exists, science can't really go much further than that, at least in its current state.

As to whether this experience is caused by contact with god, or the sacred, or whatever, I'd put myself in your same "agnostic atheist" camp. Only I'd say that I'll approach some future experiences on the assumption that God is there. (Not that I'm going to go out and become super religious or anything, but being able to suspend disbelief once and a while is the key to making things fun, whether it's watching Star Wars or reading about Mysticism or whatever.)

That's the real take away I think, that in the same way most people don't like math because they were "mathematically abused" as kids, most people don't like religion because they were religiously abused as kids. When actually learning about religion is kinda fun and intellectually interesting.
Reminds me of Self: http://research.sun.com/self/
Good stuff Jacquesm. That's one of the most beautiful things about the internet, things can literally live on forever.

Simple as you take it, in this one thread alone there are at least two copies of significant portions of geocities, and I am sure there are others out there (not even aware of HN) that have done the same.

Oh how I love technology.
New JVM options and Scala iteration performance
Sounds cool, but I'm booked through to Election Day (11/3) with campaign work. Next month, though!
Let's say it's 2T of data, that's 16,000,000,000,000 bits.

At 50 Mbits / second that's:

16,000,000,000,000 / 50,000,000 = 320,000 seconds.

That's 88 hours. I used a little more than that because I was off to a slow start and messed up on the filenames (I never expected them to be case insensitive), and there is the bloody bandwidth limiter at Yahoo that keeps tripping you up.

I really don't want to see the message 'Service Temporarily Unavailable.' ever again.
Only if they do the 3 weeks on, 1 week off cycle that is commonly prescribed. Women who continue to take the hormone pills can skip menstruation.

Related to the current discussion, women would quickly realize that their menstrual cycle is not lining up with the week of non-hormone pills.
Something simple - Add margin to the left side. It is very hard to read with the text up against the edge of the browser.

It would be good to understand the location of the server(s) doing the monitoring.
Thanks for the feedback.

I agree on the design: none of us is a graphic designer, so that's on the to-do. We just needed to get something up.

The product is still under development; we're taking a risk by announcing our intention ahead of our product, but we've got enough done at this point that product releases should start happening Real Soon Now.

There's also a fourth (and fifth) problem in the mix: advertising (and revenue in general).

Man, Broadersheet's website really blows ours away. :-)
"But I think your advice is specific to the model you've built and the output you are yielding."

This is equally true for what pg is saying, of course.
Fred Destin’s ignorance theory
The SSD Improv
Rate my Startup - SEOTrac.com (Need Your Review)
Nutshell: SEOTrac allows users to track and monitor the effectiveness of their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) campaigns. I'd appreciate your feedback!

Long Version: SEO is going to be a Wild West community for the foreseeable future. Believe me, I know; I have an affiliate marketing site that tried (unsuccessfully) to compete against guys with big PPC marketing dollars, and I quickly learned SEO is the only way to go (for that site, anyway).

When I tried searching for SEOs, I was incredibly frustrated - there's no reputable source for objectively ranking SEO performance, and especially SEOs that work in particular industry verticals, so I decided to do something about it. My site, SEOTrac.com, allows users to track, for free, the performance of their campaigns (PageRank moves over time, keyword ranking statistics, etc.). The big question I’m trying to answer for everyone using SEO – you’ve spent $$ on improving your rankings; could you have done any better? And with which SEO company?

Once I have enough SEO’s in my database, and enough campaigns, I’ll be able to rank the effectiveness of those SEOs, and give an objective data point to webmasters or site owners looking to add or improve SEO in their marketing mix.

Signup is free and as easy as adding a URL and clicking “Sign Up”, so in addition to comments, please add your site to the database (if not an SEO Campaign as well, either done in-house or through an professional).

I’m at michaelhn AT SEOTrac (dot) com if you want to reach out to me personally (including, if you think you can help over and above your HN comments).

Thanks!
Incredible how this Android article was all about Windows mobile and barely mentioned iphone...
It seems to me that the only thing you monitor is the domain name, like pingdom. If this is the case, maybe you should make it clearer.

If not, you should make that clearer too. When I think of site monitor, what I want is to be able to monitor my hdd, cpu usage, ram spikes, main domains, etc. E.g. similar to serverdensity.com's offering.

Add some more info about exactly what you offer, and the cost. I know it says free on the sign-up page, but you should make it clear on the main page that this is a beta period.

Good job on actually launching though. Many people don't even make it that far!
Do you think that being a good atheist requires a certain level of intelligence that many people don't have?

In particular, the extent to which a person can predict the consequences of his/her actions is probably highly dependent on intelligence.

Religion can be viewed as taking some of this unfairness away.
You cannot stop evolution, you can only change the fitness criteria.
This 15" HP Omnibook 6100 (made in 2001) has a huge (1400x1050) screen - I can't find anything like it.
Thanks, will do. The servers are currently in Florida, California and London. I will be adding more soon hopefully. I will create a Help/Info section detailing where the servers are and more details about how often they poll/what their user agent is etc.. You can see all the servers on a map in the website detail page if you have a website setup.
If you're using a Mac you might find it interesting to know that the spotlight search bar can be used as a calculator almost exactly the same way as Google can... Unfortunately it can't do conversions (at least not on Leopard). Also, the shortcut for spotlight is CMD + Space.
I'm all for revisionist views of Adrianople. My best impression currently is that the ongoing schism between east and west led to bad miscommunications and the eastern emperor rushing ahead into a flanking ambush that resulted in the near-destruction of the western army of the Eastern Empire.

With the late-late empire, I believe that doom came from the fall of the Libyan breadbasket to the Vandals, though that doesn't explain why Egypt (East but still Roman) couldn't provide food to Roman Italy, since it was yet to fall for another 200 years...

Let's see what this book tells me... thanks for the link.

The biggest question I have re: the Roman fall is how did the East stay stable while the West collapsed, though I'm also interested in the process by which a single Patriarchy in Rome managed to gain temporal authority while the Patriarchates in Constantinople, Alexandria, and Jerusalem remained bound to separate political organizations.
Uurghh, not a very sensible article. High on principle but low on practicality.

Think what you like about owning a company versus share investing as a good way to build a nest-egg, this is not the crux.

Shares and cash are exchangeable to other parties.
A stake in your company is not exchangable

So that's the main difference, unless your pet company has lots of cash-at-bank which you can draw on, you cannot easily liquidate a portion of your company for cold hard assets.
wget -p -r -l 0 -nc -U "I can't believe it's not Googlebot/2.1" -i "$FILE"

... and you wouldn't have.
Not to sound harsh, but your logic here epitomizes the stereotype of conservative as uncaring/greedy/self-absorbed. Instead of being concerned that people will die, your reasons for supporting seat belt laws is that it reduces your liability. Maybe you actually have some concern for human life, and don't actually intend to leave that impression; if not, it's worth considering how you present your argument, because right away you've alienated anyone who doesn't have a strictly utilitarian (or perhaps libertarian) view of the world.
Is there a list somewhere of all the specialized searches?
Cool - I will make it clearer. I actually have the server-side monitoring in development, but I'm trying to focus on this one product for now.
Mac Mini Pays for Itself After 2 Years
I enjoy Ezra Klein as a left-perspective, wonky (politically technical, if you're not familiar with the term) writer who has a special focus on the intricacies of health care policy.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/
How do you list an achievement where you were part of a team?

It sounds dumb to me to write: "helped build X". Any ideas?
He created this as a project he was interested in first. I don't think his original intention was to open source it.
I'm not the author, but my own advice is: Personal, relevant, five sentences max. The same as any email you'd send to anyone else you've never met.

As for computing the traffic numbers, first look to see if they have a media kit on their page or an RSS subscriber badge. Then look at the number of inbound links on Technorati and Google. Then check sites like Alexa and Compete. Also check the number of comments on the site, if there are any. Pay attention to the quality of the posts themselves. Are they writing original ideas, like Fred Wilson, or are they mostly regurgitating the results of PEW research studies? Have they won any awards? And lastly, take into account what platform they're on. A Typepad blog is going to have different traffic patterns than a Tumblr blog, simply because of the ecology of the platform and the userbase.

Using this you should be able to get a pretty decent estimate of the readership, especially once you have 10 or 20 blogs where you have exact data to use as a benchmark.
Hehe, that's a good trick :)

Reminiscent of the Compaq one:

BIOS NOT (C) IBM 1982

Or something to that effect!

Here is what I use, now modified with your trick:

wget -r -nv -np -nc -i $URLFILE

With a separate process putting file in batches of 50,000 files.

That way you get one wget process to do a boatload of work instead of firing up a new one for every file. That also helps in re-using the connections.
That's a common resolution. I have a Thinkpad T42 with that same 15" screen, although, that resolution equally common at 14" (my wife has a T43 with that resolution).

The iMac 27" is really a unique resolution, largely due to I believe, the change in aspect ratio.
We contacted about 30, resulting in around 7 hits. Some of our biggest hits were secondary though, larger blogs would see us on smaller ones and contact us for a demo code.

Our pitch email subject line was a brief description of the product then "- Free demo codes for your readers". The body had a similar format: what we do, here's your code, contact us with any questions, thanks.

Lots of sites have feedburner badges to give subscriber counts. We found one blog that was clearly faking that though. Their traffic to us was way lower than an 80k subscriber blog would send.

The number of comments on posts is a good indicator too. Anything greater than 0 means they've got a fairly big audience.
That's where I got the idea from. I was really excited to see what the most popular projects on github were, but this is just the tip of the iceberg b/c they refuse to show the complete leaderboard breakdown.
I wish I could remember what my Geocities site was called. It was before Yahoo! bought them, so it has been quite a while.
First off, I think is is an interesting article highlighting the difference between pointer arithmetic and array access. As far as the title goes, I think the answer should be a quick and obvious no. Pointers are variables that contain a particular memory address. Arrays are CONSECUTIVE pieces of memory where the variable name holds the address of the first piece of allocated memory. Conceptually, this is very different and the article does quite a nice job explaining the low level details of why you cannot gloss over this difference. The bit about arrays being converted to pointers in functions is left on my to read pile for now...
Yeah, I have played with Awesome recently and it is not nearly as flaky anymore. I still enjoy xmonad's test suite, however. Software that ships with a test suite tends to be more reliable than software that doesn't have tests.

(Example of software without a test suite: Emacs. No tests anywhere; not for the byte compiler, not for the memory allocator, nowhere. I am amazed it works at all.)
I'm partial to Kipling's "If," which should be quite popular among this crowd: http://www.everypoet.com/archive/poetry/Rudyard_Kipling/kipl...
I'd also like to add that he definitely should take advantage of his age, but to be careful when doing it. When you do it too much you basically make it seem as if you're asking people to see your hypothetical merit (so, if you're older) rather than the merit of what you are doing now. This can be good but obviously we see some more negative responses here too.
I use conkeror (emacs vimperator, basically). The only program I need a mouse for is a PDF reader. I have tried evince and xv, and would gladly accept a replacement :)
+1 - I'm always looking for a better simple solution for multiple domains, but I won't sign up until I know what I'm getting.
Navigate a Grid Using Combinations And Permutations
Ok, early 2000s aesthetic sans a flash intro. But we're talkin' internet years here so you're still rockin Air Force 1s, but their as popular as ever. And like I said earlier - it doesn't matter. Not like Buffett and his famous annual letters to shareholders are looked down on because he has a "thrifty" site either http://www.berkshirehathaway.com

Looking at it with firebug, the whole nav is one tall .gif and all the links are mapped via rectangular coordinates. The title for each essay is also a .gif, though they have alt description tags.

I know its your baby, but if you managed this with wordpress or another CMS, it would be really easy and you could be much more flexible to add new things. With wordpress, you could make a theme just like your current, but with CSS styled text links and you would just make static pages for all your new essays and whatnot. I could recreate your whole site in about an hour if you'd like.
Wow, I never thought of that. However, I don't think the answer is forcing people to wear seatbelts, but rather to exonerate the at-fault driver from the other driver's decision against seatbelt use. The former not only encroaches on people's rights, but it doesn't actually solve the problem mentioned, because the other person can still decide not to wear a seatbelt.

Luckily, I live in a no-fault state though. But still, that's a very good point.
What in the world makes you think Microsoft lets anyone put backdoors into their software?
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=901375
I've actually used that keyboard - it's nowhere near the quality of the Apple keyboard. Keys are mushy and soft, and even the chiclet keys have a more solid feel than that.

Not to mention the whole thing reeked of plasticy cheapness.

Let me put it this way. If I drive once a week, I'd save money and get a little econobox Toyota. If, however, I spent 8 hours a day behind the wheel, I'd invest in a BMW or something else nice.

In the same way, I spend at least 8 hours in front of a computer every single day - why in the world wouldn't I spend $100 on a keyboard/mouse combo? That's dirt cheap considering the mileage I get out of them. It just doesn't make sense to skimp on hardware when you spend so much time with it (and also, if it's your primary moneymaking machine).
It looked so amateur. The interface said 'hello world' to me, and then I left within 2 seconds. Put at least some serious effort, and feel you have something of value before getting people to spend time criticizing something for you. I feel a bit insulted, as if being an HN reader puts my time into the value category of someone doing cent-work on Amazon Turk. At the level of work you've put in thus far, keep the round table of 'consultants' to your mother.

True story. Remember to add it to your notes.
I can't help but feel "$16 billion, and the best thing you can think of to do with it is give it away?"

For a bit of perspective, the Wikipedia list of countries by GDP shows his personal wealth is more than the GDP of the lowest one hundred countries. More than Nepal, Afghanistan, Jamaica, not far away from Iceland. More than Tuvalu's GDP for a thousand years.

The Manhattan Project cost about $22 Billion in today's dollars (says Wikipedia).

He is in an incredibly rare place where an individual has the economic power of a small country, a big company, a city council. That much cash channeled into one area could work wonders. World changing wonders.

How much would a "Manhattan Project" push for any one of the scientific holy grails cost? (Room Temperature Superconductivity, for instance).

It seems almost a waste to just give it to charity and ignore such a large and rare opportunity to do what almost no other person can afford and no company or government can justify.
Thanks. This answer is correct and I don't think I need to add much more to it.
I have a 15" Dell Precision M70 (4 years old now, overheats regularly) with 1920x1200 res, haha. Yeah, things show up pretty small but really clear.
Couldn't agree more. Which makes the price delta between Dell products and comparable Apple products all the more egregious.
how is holding large stakes in a small number of businesses less risky

Good point, especially if your small businesses have a limited shelf life (e.g. web based startup that can be replaced by the "next big thing").
It's possible to run Windows Photoshop on Linux with VMWare Workstation. I assume.
I'm currently working on this problem right now with my company imVOX (http://imvox.com/trial.php). We're trying to finish up our client and slowly pull out of the real 'testing' phase of beta and more into an RC status and have load tests, etc.

Yet getting good beta testers is hard. Many people sign up, use it once, hit a bug and then never return. Understandable, but even emailing people (personally) hasn't been all that effective in getting people back consistently. I probably have 10 people that I can keep going to and know that they will use it again and again and provide feedback.

I've yet to go on a strong blog push yet, but thats probably my next approach.

Other methods to find bloggers: YouTube and Twitter Search. I've also been looking through friend's shared stuff on Google Reader occasionally to mark off ones to contact.

One twist that I have as problematic is that I don't have and 'special codes' to hand out to people currently. We had a system setup like that a while ago, but I think it was slowing downloads a bit so now its just a download link and you register for a (free) account in-client.

In addition for ideas of how to get more testers via blogging (commenting is important I know too), anyone trying it out would be really appreciated. I'm going to have them push the newest build to our download and auto-update servers later today.
It depends on that publication.

If you proved P = NP* and that was your only publication, I'd still include it.

*-other than the joke "for P = 0 or N = 1"
I'm pretty excited about using this. I contacted them a few weeks ago asking to use some of their code and they mentioned open sourcing it soon (much to my excitement). I do a lot of social network analysis and having this (in addition to NLTK and the ANEW analysis set) will really help provide some interesting analysis of influencers online.
There's evidently a market for a tech-specific search engine..
I think maybe you missed something in his post. How is he being uncaring/greedy/self-absorbed by acknowldedging how he is impacted by others' decision to use a seatbelt or not?

He isn't saying people shouldn't wear a seatbelt. He's saying it should be their choice. If someone chooses not to wear their seatbelt, they obviously care more about their own convenience and comfort than their safety and well-being. Why should he (or anyone else) worry about their lives more than they do themselves?

Not to sound harsh, but I think that your logic epitomizes the stereotype of the extreme liberal who thinks it's everyone else's responsibility to support and take care of you. You've alienated anyone who doesn't have a strictly socialist view of the world.

Of course, if you're not alienating someone, then you're probably not thinking things through enough to form a strong opinion. So, good on you for having an opinion either way ;-)
Whether I really belong here. I used to think it was a given, now I'm really not sure. So much stuff I'm interested in gets completely ignored, and I'm pretty sure it's been seen. There's the occasional zinger, but I no longer think I'm a good match for this community.
Well, religion and intelligence have been shown to be inversely correlated. Perhaps 'intelligence' is the wrong word; educational level might be better.

For example, only 7 percent of the members in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences believe in a personal god [1]. I forget the numbers for the general public of the US (I don't have the book with me), but it was the vast majority who believed in a personal god.

Of course: grains of salt, correlation vs. causation, etc.

I don't think being an atheist requires a certain level of intelligence, but I do think that people of a certain level of education have been taught to think critically about everything they read/learn/work with, which probably bleeds over into their personal life.

[1] Victor J. Stenger. Has Science Found God? p.78
Wow, strange moderation. I bumped you up to +2 earlier in the day (as I appreciate your contribution), but now you are back to 1. I can't believe someone would downmod this comment; you aren't even arguing about anything, you are just sharing your config.

Sometimes HN makes me sad.