skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They contend that value is a more-or-less innate quality that the skilled are best at recognizing. Stating your position baldly isn't a particularly strong counterargument.

Value, in the money sense, is what someone is prepared to pay. That's the kind of value I was referring to.

Doesn't matter whether it's elitist, in the same way that it doesn't matter whether Darwin caused the Holocaust.

Godwin's law.

The fact that the consequences are unpleasant does not mean that the assertion is untrue.

You ignored the second part of my conclusion: everyone has limited time, and they have to select a subset of what is possible that they will actually do.

Also: the post I was responding to was talking about trying to maximize global enjoyment, and proposed that if everyone decided to become experts in a single narrow field of content everyone would be better off. This, however, is also unlikely to find the global maximum. How will everyone know which tiny subfield has the biggest potential for enjoyment? Without trying a lot of different routes to enjoyment, it's very unlikely that they will choose the best one by pure chance. Compare this to genetic algorithms; you need randomness to escape a local maximum.

Another problem with the proposed solution is that different people have different personalities and it's very unlikely that a single narrow field will appeal to everyone. Some subset of the population will get lots of enjoyment, while another subset will be bored to tears. That's not going to improve average enjoyment.
I am running MSSQL on Windows on EC2 without any issues, normal db tuning rules apply.
It's no more a "marijuana cafe" than many existing dispensaries in California.

The guy running it is a marketing genius though since I've come across this story multiple times on different sites in the past few days.
Ya, pretty sure 17 is not possible. Unless you can turn off the flashlight on the way back?
Interfaces vs Inheritance (or, watch out Go)
I'm still a bit skeptical about ZFS, seen a few horror stories with it (one of the major complaints is the fact that ZFS "shouldn't" need an fsck util, but that it really does....

Also, is ZFS root bootable without trickery yet?
This paper was written 7 years before SELinux was merged.
These "NoSQL" comparisons are a tricky thing, inasmuch as this is a very volatile space with a lot of really interesting development happening. Furthermore, benchmarking a handful of storage options that are really only alike in that they share the same thing which they are not (relational, SQL) is a lot like running road tests on a handful of cars that are not Honda Civics.

I made the foolish decision a while back to choose a data storage option based on benchmarks and hype, and I'm currently paying for it by having achieved spectacular launch failure and now completely rearchitecting my backend.

NoSQL emerged only after a decade or so of webscale challenges helped us finally realize that everything only looked like relational nails because the only tool we had was SQL hammer, and that tackling every data warehousing problem with SQL was coming at the cost of money, engineering hours, and headaches. Now that viable, production-ready alternatives have become available it's important that design decisions to go beyond seeing problems as not-nails and seeing them instead for what they are.

Are you looking for reliable, versioned master-master replication for embedded devices? Might want to consider Couch. An obscenely fast caching tier that need not persist to disk? Sure, check out Scalaris. A fully distributed and pluggable map-reduce architecture capable of storing a metric fucktonne of data? Hbase might be for you. And, it should go without saying, there are still and there will always be problems for which SQL is the best solution.

In any event, an invaluable starting point is Richard Jones' post at Metabrew discussing research on a number of options for Lastfm: http://www.metabrew.com/article/anti-rdbms-a-list-of-distrib...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=540078
I Like What I Hear About the $40M Seed Stage Fund, "Founder Collective"
> How do you write a Common Lisp function which polymorphicly converts an integer to whatever type you need?

How does the callee know what the caller needs?

Suppose that one callee produces an int (as above), the first caller wants a string (decimal digits in ascii) and the second wants a byte array (little endian). Do you really think that the caller (or compiler) should be responsible for accomodating those conversions? Now let's add a caller that wants the index of the "high bit" - how are you going to accomodate that? (Of course, other callers want an int - I'm just mentioning the callers that require some sort of conversion.)

Neither the callee nor the compiler/system can automatically provide anything beyond the most trivial of conversions. That's why the right solution to the third caller, either an in-line shim or a wrapper, is the right solution to either the first or second caller.

> With macros, you could just include the creation of the appropriate classes in the form that defines a new type. In fact, it could be built into the language making even macros unnecessary.

Lisp macros can do many other things. (Consider the loop construct.)
DIY - Social Network Analysis on your Outlook Inbox Relationships
Hacker? Eu? Depende... (Matérias)
OMG, I've been battling this issue too, especially in regards to the music industry.

For now, it is still unclear how customers can safely and conveniently pay for digital goods, without credit/debit cards; especially now we are not in a digital currency world.

But these are all interesting models you've posted here.

Thanks for the links
What's the difference between a cafe and a dispensary? Forgive me, I have no clue of the various subtleties of marijuana purchase. Where I live it's simply illegal.
ZFS on FreeBSD is great, but its mostly ZFS is great compared to UFS/geom or ext{3,4}/LVM.

svn.apache.org is using it now, we caused many panics on FreeBSD 7.x with ZFS -- and lots of patches are now baked into 8.x, with all the patches ZFS has been great for apache.
Questions of that type often state that your only means of weighing the objects is a balance scale, i.e., you can put balls 1 and 2 on one side and balls 3 and 4 on the other to see which pair is heavier, and that's "one weighing". I'm guessing that's what russell's question is, at any rate.
Maybe it's time for personal servers?
Yes this is true of Reuters as well. Which is fine; the point of the news from the POV of the people paying for the service is to inform their trading decisions.
It seems that colour blind people can't see css background images either.
I think there's a genuine need for this kind of solution for medicine, which can have much more serious consequences than an upset stomach. The economics would make more sense too, as it would be much easier to justify adding a few cents to a $50 antibiotic than to a $1 yogurt bottle. Alas, I don't have a technical solution, although I suspect a very simple electronic circuit might do the trick.
"These kinds of problems are relevant when done properly."

Agreed, but they have to be done properly, which is quite hard to do.
> To me it seems absolutely imperative that criminals - up to and including those guilty of capital crimes - be given a new lease on life, contingent upon the terms of their sentencing.

Oh really? So if you have kids, you're perfectly happy not knowing that you're living next to a pedophile?

> My point is that the spirit of the law - that convicted criminals who have served their time have the right to be judged on their own terms subsequently without that cloud hanging over their head - deserves at least some intellectual consideration in this case.

Yes it does. But it isn't the only point that deserves consideration. Past behavior is relevant, and the relevance is circumstance dependent. (If you don't have kids, living next to a pedophile may be no big deal.)

The best solution is likely to be accurate and useful information. (Note that all of the above poster's complaints are actually due to inaccurate or incomplete information.)

> just because someone committed a crime does not mean they are not a human being and do not deserve your thoughts and your empathy.

No one ever said tht they weren't a human being, but you don't have the right to decide who gets my thoughts and empathy. (Note that this has nothing to do with prison records.) Or rather, if you insist on trying to impose your decisions on me, you'll find that I can play that game too and I don't care whether you like the result.

I'm only willing to let you make the decisions that you prefer if I get the same consideration.
That's a very interesting read, I never figured that something like Braess' Paradox would have such acute real life examples. I though it was mostly a thing confined to theory.
Re: our patent application for an evil advertising scheme [Fake Steve Jobs]
Graphs don't seem accurate for real-life situations. And I miss Redis in the comparison chart (IMHO memcache shouldn't be there)
If you haven't read it, I'll save you the time: "Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit." (There is as much value in that one sentence as there is in this guy's entire rambling blog post.)
I think it's implied that you want to know whether or not the ball you've picked is the heavy one.

What's not clear is whether "weighing" is a unary operation returning the weight of the ball, or a binary operation returning the heavier of two balls.
Now if only they could invest some of that money into a better website...
> ... many people here are not interested in startups ...

What?

Sorry, I'm just stunned. Let me add a comment ...

If you start a business while in the USA on a student visa you could be in very, very deep trouble. I am not a lawyer, nor even based in the USA, so I don't know for sure, but it's not something I'd try. I do know someone who has been banned from the USA for a similar infraction.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews Protest at Intel's Jerusalem Plant About Sabbath Work
/mnt is not a ram drive, it's ephemeral hard disk, and EBS has better IO than the /mnt. You only get 1.7GB RAM on the small instance.
Remember that one method scammers use to exploit the ignorant and unfortunate is to tempt people with a glamorous lifestyle. If you think there is a scam going on and you aren't already "in" on it then you could be a target. Don't be fooled.

Make something people want. If you're young then you have plenty of time to succeed by doing something worthwhile instead of ultimately impoverishing everyone through trickery.
Seems like you might not want to do it if they enter a correct existing username/password, otherwise there is the slim (but non-zero) chance that they'll fluke into an account that isn't theirs. I figure email would be a better "username" since they aren't likely to enter the same one.

I don't know if you've encountered that problem (rare, I know).
what about a solution that relies on cameras in the fridge/kitchen area and AI that can tell you are opening a bottle of something? The code would have to detect the various bottles maybe do OCR on the labels and build a db of what is in your kitchen. Maybe the packaging could be made more easier to scan but maybe not.You could even "show" your new groceries to the system or it could ask you what certain things are that it couldn't ID.

The point is that this system would be something you could install and not impact the supply chain with a lot of new requirements on the packaging.
dont worry about it - i've had plenty of sites rank just fine in Google with redirects and subdomains, if you do a little digging into Google's webmaster guidelines, they even mention it to some extent (not that everything mentioned in their own doc's are 100% accurate as to what will and will not hurt your rankings)...
See also more recently a startup based on this idea from two Yale professors and a student:

http://www.stickk.com/

(Earlier mentioned by pbh below.)
I know what a screen reader simulation is - perhaps you should google "joke."
I think that for the PG sample that is because the 'bite' is too big. If you say you're going to be a millionaire before you're 30 you are going to find out soon enough that that is not so easy and maybe give up, whereas if you hadn't thought about it you might have accidentally succeeded.

For me the usage is very simple, bite-sized concrete things that I know I can easily do but keep postponing.

I would never use it for something that is either out of my immediate reach or not under my control. Then it would have the opposite effect.
Obviously Newsweek can't.

They run this story twice per business cycle, and have been since the 1970s.
I forgot if that case ever resolved itself fully, but, isn't $3000 like less than 1% of what she wound up liable for?
Dodd to Startupers: "Let's Make it Just That Much Tougher to Raise Angel $$"
If you're going to criticize what I write, please criticize it rather than just snarking.
A dispensary implies that it "dispenses" the product, like a pharmacy. You take it home and consume it.

A cafe implies that people are consuming the product on site.
Gotcha! Thanks for the clarification.
Something I've looked at: http://htmlunit.sourceforge.net/

Also, I'm not sure how they do it, but Jaxer (http://www.jaxer.org/) has a headless firefox instance they use. Maybe do it in a similar manner?
You used the word "shit" 105 times in one post. At that saturation point, the only takeaway I got was "This guy sure likes to say 'shit.'"
If 7 was backported to XP (presumably as a service pack) it would be free.
Looks like the article addresses this point:

"It’s also trying to revamp its Web site and television programming — long neglected inside the company — into services that appeal to people who don’t trade securities for a living."
That advice was some good shit, maybe great shit.
I'm calling total bullshit on those performance graphs. Neither Tokyo Tyrant nor MySQL is anywhere nearly as fast as memcached unless you have a really bad memcached client (and they do exist).

I got somewhere over 90k stores per second on my macbook localhost with my java client. If he's only getting around 3k, he must be doing them by hand.
I completely agree, however I dont think broadband is going to be good enough for the next X years for "personal" to mean quite the same thing, not to mention the issues of backups, power saving and such.

I expect to see something like myopera / couchdb / ubuntu one type system where your personal machines are mirrored for full uptime, services like flickr should integrate with these machines instead of actually owning your content outright. I havent thought about how this would work too much but glad to see people like couchdb / ubuntu and mozilla try to attack it it
About the city of Cleveland's program for funding and advising startups
When I originally wrote the article, I was using the word stuff — but stuff is such a boring word. It's got a lag to it. Ditto other options, like things and work and product. Shit, on the other hand, is a very pointed, quick word. It serves perfectly as a placeholder for "anything else", which is what I'm really talking about.

This isn't about writing good code, or good music, or making good music. It's about making anything. The technique is the same regardless of whether you're making a lesson plan or a DIY desk.

I mean, it's not like I didn't know I was writing the word "shit". Usually I don't write any swears into my posts. This one, that one word was the point.
Ishihara tests on your monitor are not going to be accurate. Get them on paper, the colours will be far better.
Well, whether or not it's actually faster, it sure feels orders of magnitude faster.

xmonad may use only 1000 lines of code for the window manager itself, but that's backed up by a rather large Haskell library (particularly when loading lots of contributed code). I know the resident memory size of xmonad is gigantic compared to musca. Manipulation of those large memory structures may be relatively slow, even if you use efficient algorithms (particularly on systems like my own, which use so much memory that some of my apps are swapped out).

As for Haskell being high level and safe, I appreciate that. But it really does me little good when I don't know Haskell. The musca window manager doesn't require knowing Haskell, and I think it's just as flexible, and certainly high level enough (you can use bash scripts, or really any language you want to configure it) and safe enough for me not to have any issues with it.

Sure, using Haskell might be better, if I knew Haskell. But I don't, and I'm not going to learn it any time soon. So it's a moot point.
I generally use svn export as opposed to an actual working copy
This passage by FSJ may highlight the essential difference between Google and Apple in coming years, even as they offer superficially similar services:

Google might make a play for this [replacing cable TV] as well. But they’ll try to do it without charging money, which will never work. Google’s whole world revolves around generating revenue through advertising. And they still think that asking people to pay for something is just a total non-starter because nobody wants to pay for anything anymore.

Truth is, money is the easiest thing to get people to give up. Much easier than asking them to give up their time. Nobody wants to watch ads or futz around with some science project where you have to integrate a bunch of different things and it never works right.

That is: Google wants people to pay with their attention and time, which Google then resells to businesses for cash. Apple wants people to pay in cash, to save attention and time.

And somewhat relatedly: is there a higher proportion of Apple customers among people who click Google ads (spending their attention freely), or among people who buy Google ads (buying the attention of others, or paying to preserve their own)? I don't have figures but strongly suspect the latter.
100,000 tasklets: Stackless and Go
I'm just letting you know that your point becomes shrouded by the repetition of a single word. If the entire point was that one word, then mission accomplished, because it's the only thing I'm going to remember about it.
I get what you're saying. I'm disappointed if that's all you got out of it.
Campus Party Mexico
Richard Hamming talks about doing this in his "You and Your Research" talk: http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html

(search for 'ashamed')
I'd suggest to have two sections.

One for 'Students/Users' who have questions 1. XXXX 2.XXXX 3.XXXX, and another for 'TUTORS' 1.XXXX 2.XXXX 3.XXXX

I hope this helps
Here are a few issues that come to mind:

- Nobody wants to be a sysadmin. Being a sysadmin sucks, and taking care of servers is hard. Sure, your content may disappear if the startup goes offline, but it will disappear if you have a hard drive crash, are hacked, lose power, or any of the million other issues that can happen.

- People have come to expect fairly good reliability. Having everyone host their own content will be a big step backwards in this regard. Dave's picture? They've been inaccessible for a week... Guess I can't check them out.

- Most broadband connections in the US are not symmetrical in bandwidth: They have much more download than upload bandwidth. That means that most connections do not have enough bandwidth to serve even a moderately popular image, let alone a popular video.

- Last but not least, the vast, vast majority of people are not even close to technical enough to take even the most basic steps involved. For this vision to become reality, the process would need to get much, much easier.
Maybe my comment was not clear enough: buffering writes in memory on a single node alone has no durability to speak of. You need either a DFS or distributed DB that does replication of the buffers on different nodes to provide some reasonable durability.
Lesson 9: Count on the federal government bailing out the company insuring your credit default swaps. Otherwise, your "investments" will be worthless.
Yes. And the examples won't always work on modern linux distros depending on configuration
Rules of program optimization
In short: The compiler knows best
How to Design Call-to-Action Buttons with Photoshop
I think that most developers have a "personal server" (or two!)

I keep MongoDB, CouchDB, Sesame, PostgreSQL+PostGIS, etc. "always on" for my personal and research projects - keeping my stuff separate and using customer's VPSs or EC2 instances, etc. for their work.

Would I want to have all of this stuff running all the time on my laptop? I don't think so.

I used to keep at least one server running on our home network but now I mostly use a really cheap VPS, and a small "3 year pay in advance" EC2 instance. Running a server or two in my house is something that I only do for special needs.

Anyway, I live with the network latency hit for the convenience of (usually) not having to run servers in my home.
Not sure why the parenthetical is "watch out Go". Isn't the article supporting Go's take on interfaces and no inheritance?
The pain point in this particular case (I worked with qhoxie and bjclark on this) wasn't so much that the EBS performance was consistently bad, but that it was very unpredictable. Servers would suddenly, for no apparent reason, start performing very poorly.

That's been a consistent theme I've seen with EC2 instances--it's hard to predict how fast something is going to be, and once it's running, you don't know if its performance is going to change. That's one reason to take benchmarks of EC2 (and possibly other cloud providers) with a grain of salt.

I've heard anecdotes of people starting up n EC2 instances, running benchmarks on each, then killing all but the fastest ones.
Let me offer a different summary:

The greatest satisfaction to a hacker is to produce output that gives the hacker pleasure to look at, think about, and use.

Achieving this satisfaction is an iterative hill climbing optimization. Each iteration depends on making something. By making lots of shit (there's that word), you get to see what output gives you satisfaction; and you feel some satisfaction, which gives you the energy to make more. Notice what you made that gives you pleasure, and how you made it. Repeat until you are a satisfied Hacker.

(I agree that the word got so overused I couldn't parse the writing very well -- like if you say the word 'apple' 100 times, you start to forget what it means -- or like the way if you eliminate microsaccades, foveated objects start to disappear [1].)

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16423702
I don't have figures but strongly suspect the latter.

You are underestimated the technical ability and drive of apple users, you must understand that most computer users are normal people (including apple). Those ads you see on TV for apple are meant for those same people that the Windows 7 ads are meant for.

On another idea from the quote you took if say apple came out with a TV option under a monthly fee and at the same time google came out with an alternative that was free but had an ad every 15 minutes or something along the lines google, the company who can spend and spend and has the market support, would come out on top even if they had the lesser service. No one should ever underestimate the power of free.
>Oh really? So if you have kids, you're perfectly happy not knowing that you're living next to a pedophile?

What would I do if my kids /were/ living next to a pedophile? Move? Lock them indoors 24/7? Burn the guy's house down? Ask him to move in next to someone else's kids instead of mine?

Knowing that my kids are living next to a pedophile would most likely just cause me needless stress.