skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ack, sorry. I'm in the process of moving to Dreamhost and my home DSL isn't very good at being a webhost... Sorry, this was bad timing. :)
@hyperbovine - something like that, yes. He gets flown out to overclocking demos/competitions by various sponsor companies and often works with AMD/Intel for testing unreleased processors or participating in their launches. He just got back from a competition in Beijing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8_V_Zd2ljk
Oh and have you seen the Single Ladies video? Fosse was a genius, and this is him the nth degree.
Google UK town that only exists online
And in the SAN space too - Hitachi make a lot of money on dedupe products.
Happily, they have a 'verify' mode which checks the data on disc instead of making the assumption that SHA256 works as promised.
Wait so gravity is quantum entanglement?

I've never been given that view before. If I understand you correctly, gravity does have an effect faster than the speed of light but there is no detectable effect faster than the speed of light?
Maybe. That makes it less interesting to me, but I wasn't trying to make a value judgment.

Although the rest of the article is worth reading. I don't think the author confuses humanities academia with science or engineering academia - I think the submitter did. I think the assumption with his essay is that what he says applies to the humanities, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Virtual machines (and Solaris Zones).

Database dumps as backups.

Email servers with lots of CCing.

Although it's probably more for 'Enterprises' than web apps.
And the ones raking in that cash, besides the scammers, are the telecomm companies and Google/Facebook/etc. - the first get a cut, the second sell the ads.

I used the ad feedback link to give Google a piece of my mind about their collaboration in these scams. Seems that they, and the telcos, are willing to keep raking in the cash until their name is mud.
CI is currently terrible. Anyone that can bring CI to the masses by making it easier to implement and use should make a killing.
At some point some things are a matter of taste and some people will like one design while others will like the other.

For example for me it's the opposite than this author: I don't like video too much; I'd rather read and a sign-up page is more intimidating than some text explaining the service.
The same patterns thing is mitigated by the property that changing one bit in the input is (supposed to) change on average half of the bits in the hash.

You can also be reassured that there's lots of research going on about how likely these collisions are and how to find them. People are actively trying to break these hash algorithms, so it's not just in theory.
There are many applications that do not require unique algorithms and can be solved using simple regressions. Also not everybody has access to a ML expert to code a solution (even if this only requires a simple ANN using an opensource library).
Open Source Changes the Software Acquisition Process
Well, more like bytecode that doesn't contain a zero-byte, which'd stop a string dead-on.
Ask HN: Making a simple Augmented Reality iPhone App - Any samples/tutorials?
I can't find anything in the iPhone docs telling me what to use to display a realtime view from the camera and then alter that display. Does anyone have tips on how to start learning how to make an augmented reality app?
You could do something like zoneedit and just have some stern warning about dropping your accounts or charging you for back usage if you get caught circumventing the free limit by opening multiple accounts.
Why did you he say losing weight makes you smell bad? I've never heard of that. It sounds like a folk legend.
Why Leaves Really Fall Off Trees
Structural engineers produce bridges, even if they are arguably just a side produce. In the worst case academics only produce academics.
There's a principle associated with some famous sociologist that says "The purpose of any institution is first to perpetuate itself, and only secondarily to pursue its specified goal." I wish I could remember who said this. It's an idea with explanatory power.
Ask HN: Check out my Canvas based multiplayer Maze
http://www.graphitimaze.com/
I have been working on this for way too long in my free time and I need some outside feedback. I have tested it in Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Let me know what you think.
> How is it that women working outside the home is better than women working inside the home?

In an industrialized, modern society, you can nearly double your workforce. Educated women increase the number of knowledge workers. This, in turn, increases productivity, etc. Some women may briefly opt to stay home with their children, but the majority of women in industrialized nations return to work at some point. This is considered good.

Can you think of an industrialized nation experiencing significant growth (either recently or currently) where women are discouraged from working?
Now Solaris is open source as OpenSolaris, it's possible for someone other than Sun to build a storage appliance without having to worry about license fees.

As an example, here's some people doing it right now: http://www.nexenta.com/
Well, the author's credentials and the preface do suggest a focus on the humanities.
I never said it was true, and it is certainly for entertainment purposes as its primary focus. If you were to summarize its predictive nature, it would result in a one sentence statement. Brave New World and 1984 are better in their predictive aspects, but I was not comparing Idiocracy to them. I was primarily comparing it to The Time Machine and well... to itself in a way. The intent of the movie was not as a documentary on the condition of humanity, but as a plot device, it can serve the purpose of warning us of the danger of thinking we can predict everything when we cannot predict much of anything at all.
Fat is a storage device for lots of stuff. For example, THC (marijuana) builds up in fat cells. Losing weight releases some of that stored up junk. It's not out of the question that some of it would cause you to stink up a storm.
Wow. Going up against College Publisher? Nice--I wish you well. Maybe there's something we can do together. We hate about 90% of the CMSs that we have to implement our products in and have contemplated building a CMS that we give away just to avoid the hassle.

Currently we are only working with small daily and weekly papers, but obviously college papers would work too.
"What biological advantage does a large family have over a small family in an affluent society?"

The definition of biological advantage is having a large number of offspring rather than a small one! (Simplifying a bit; said offspring should also reproduce, recursively, but it's a decent approximation to just consider offspring.) What kind of weird question is that?

Also, to bundle a reply to another of your concerns, of course you don't observe changes yet. If you have one population averaging 3 children per couple and another of equal size averaging 1, in the first generation it may not look like that big a deal, but by the fourth or fifth generation the 1-child-per-couple group has been effectively eliminated as a significant part of the population. Surprisingly small differences magnify surprisingly rapidly across generations; evolutionists have observed species going extinct because of far smaller differences than that. I just used large numbers to make the point more understandable, it applies equally to 2.1 children vs 2.15, it just takes a few more generations in that case... and not even all that many.
Something simple I wish I learned 17 years ago
I'm sure many of you guys and gals know this. And it might be just one of those things that I have somehow missed during all my time coding QBASIC, VBA, C++, C, Ruby, Python, etc...

Most of the time when you are writing an if statement, you are comparing a mutable variable to something constant (i.e. variable to string, variable to integer, variable to symbol), so you can avoid the assignment-instead-of-comparison bug by writing constant == variable instead of variable == constant. This way if you forget one of the equals signs you'll get a syntax error. The key with this is you have to get in the habit of doing it and do it all the time, so that you don't have a false sense of security.
So instead of:

if foo.to_str == "hi everyone!\n"

puts "hello there!"

end

use

if "hi everyone!\n" == foo.to_str

puts "hello there!"

end
Comparing Norc to batch is similar to comparing it to cron. Many of the limitations of batch processing come with retrying or auditing complex trees of dependencies (bigger than a handful of tasks).

Condor has DAGMan (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/dagman/) for managing DAGs of jobs, and I suspect that it can scale higher than just a handful of tasks.

I believe resource management is limited to overall system load. Batch isn't designed for things like managing available licenses.

Condor acts as match maker for jobs and cluster nodes using "classified advertisements" (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/classad/). Classads allow you to describe the jobs and the cluster nodes, and to express arbitrary requirements and preferences for both. This allows jobs to say "I need a node with X", but it also allows nodes to express requirements (e.g. "I won't any run jobs coming from the psych department"). I don't see why you couldn't use this system for expressing requirements regarding licenses.

However, Condor appears to be very complex. The PDF version of the Condor 7.3 manual has 991 pages in it. OTOH, Red Hat MRG Grid is based on Condor (http://www.redhat.com/mrg/grid/), so commercial support should be available.
http://code.google.com/p/iphonearkit/
In a related way, the purpose of a student is to maximize his/her grades and in so doing learn a few things along the way.
I agree, the confusion is with the submitted title.
Academics also advance humanity's knowledge in their field through research and writing, so that others may stand on their shoulders and see further. Perhaps you don't believe that things like critical literary analysis are providing us any actual benefit, but I disagree and I'm sure that any humanities professor would disagree too.
Academia in the humanities field is particularly calcified and corrupt because it's so hard to measure the quality of the output (or even if anyone wants it at all).

At least with things like maths or computer science research can be verified and has utility to the broader world.
I can't get the site to load, but if he's using the Atkins diet it's well-known to cause odors due to ketosis.
Instead of SQS it uses RabbitMQ. I don't know about it's limits but since a serious RabbitMQ installation can handle something like millions of messages per second I assume the limits you will hit are in the persistence solution on celeryd. It can use a Tokyo Tyrant or MongoDB backend instead of a RDBMS, as well as memcached support. Those seem like they would help in that department.

I don't think you can change trees after they are sent (you mean subtasks, right?).

You can see logging example at "defining and executing tasks" section here: http://ask.github.com/celery/introduction.html#usage

Sorry, I am only a light user at this point in time.
Necessary Games reviews Destructivator as existentialist platformer
Another nice (simple) task application is Google Tasks. Not only is it simple, it's web based which means OS non-specific! :)
Real-time, Distributed Conversations: Some Thoughts on the Salmon Protocol
Keeping the Stream Pure: FriendFeed vs. Twitter vs. Facebook
You could make the corresponding argument for structural engineering, but it would be harder.

The corresponding statement for academia would be: "the main product of academia is not the production of ___ but..."

But what do we fill in the blank with? With structural engineering, the answer is obvious. With academia, particularly humanities academia, not so much.
Anybody who finds this stuff interesting should also check out the Hunterian Collection ( http://www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums/history/collections.html ) at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. In addition to the famous collection of anatomical preparations and specimens, the RCS museum features a fabulous collection of historic surgical instruments and artifacts, including a cringe-inducing lithotomy exhibit.

Three cheers for for antisepsis, antibiotics, and anesthetic!
Site was loading extremely slowly. So I have mirrored it here http://www.manu-j.com/tmp/chad/
> don't see why you couldn't use this system for expressing requirements regarding licenses

People do just that: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/techpaper/licenses.html

I would not say it is "complex" but ultra flexible. You will not have things working in just one day or anything, but I've set it up without a significant hassle. People have had a lot of ongoing success with Condor in large (and very large) computing environments.
Napoleon Bonaparte was also known for breaking the rules of engagement, but i guess in his case his enemies caught up in the end.
now if he could only do one for "Lost" I'd be set.
Venture Capital Firms to be Exempt from Regulation . . . Maybe
Sure, true. I've never believed it's as simple as that - people get depressed for a ton of different reasons, and the 'cures' are as wide and varying. Surely most people think this?
please leave that in for the 'rel="followtothemax"'. lol.
Totally disagree. I had contempt for students like that when I was in school. Probably still do, if I thought about it.
fcron has always been my 'go to' for a 'better cron' (http://fcron.free.fr/) and thankfully it has been available as an 'alternative' to cron in most distros for a while now.

That said, norc appears interesting, and I'll certainly be keeping an eye on it (I doubt I'll switch until it's a bit more established - and available in my favourite distros :)
> Perhaps you don't believe that things like critical literary analysis are providing us any actual benefit, but I disagree and I'm sure that any humanities professor would disagree too.

What they'll profess in public and what they'll admit "off the record" aren't always the same thing.
> "Academia" is not shorthand for "Humanities Academia."

Good point. Unfortunately, I was squeezed by the 80 character title constraint. :)
Yep. That's what I wanted to know. Sorry for the poor phrasing.

I was little confused because it seemed like norc would only start jobs at the top level.
Focuses very much on a Ph.D. in English, which is in some ways the worst rather than the average case.

However, the argument that getting a Ph.D. is getting harder while its (financial) value is decreasing seems correct to me. That might not actually be a bad thing, and is very much to be expected - the market value of doing cool and interesting things goes down as the value of tedious or dangerous jobs goes up. I think we will see even more of that in the future.

We keep complaining about people maximizing their profits rather than happiness. But then, when some choose to pursue their interests and get PhD's in areas that aren't so hot in the industry, we criticize them for bad career decisions. Maybe everything's OK with the system, after all.
The academy is really no different from mega-corporations like Wal-mart, both revolve around money and power. Both are government subsidized. The republicans fund their pet industries (military complex, healthcare, corporate interests) until democrats seize power, yank their government subsidies, and routes all that money into the academy, unions, etc (and doing a pretty damn good job of catching up to republicans in terms of being corporate shills).
Okay, fair enough. Still I have to agree with the your comment about "gutless". In my opinion it is better to add extra credibility to your discussion than it is to try to avoid being seen as a ranter.
In the article instead of saying nothing of interest was found he could have said he verified the null hypothesis.
A Sign Of The Times: The First Foreclosure API
US Government Begins to Scold (and Praise) Presidential Coin Churners
This is relatively well known in (Complex) Network theory as applied to Social Networks. You're always more likely to be connected to a Hub (someone with high degree) that to a "leaf" (in the tree sense). If you plot the average number of friends your friends have versus the number of your friends on a log-log plot, you'll see a decreasing line. (See Fig. 2 of http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.0450 for a recent example).
This article, and the one it links to for support, are self-refuting as far as I'm concerned. They make me think "be sure to have a coding test" if it keeps people who think like this away (specifically, people who think that they shouldn't have to try very hard and that their experience entitles them to preferential treatment).
I'm also pleased to see that HTML escaping by default is going in too:

http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/10/12/what-s-new-in-edge-...
Biz Ninja Says, "Choose Your (Marketing) Channel Wisely, Grasshopper."
Great products DO NOT sell themselves. So, if you have a great message or a great product, what is the right way to get the word out? There are a lot of channels out there and you need to choose the right one to fit your message.
wow that's perfect! Thanks.
FTA: "...All you need is the determination and the rest will work itself out."

Hmmm...he left out the "and funding", which is often helpful in getting through the tough times.
Hacking the Wii To Pieces
I don't know about you guys but just looking at these photos makes my blood run cold. Seeing old photos/paintings of surgery in progress is even worse.

I think we've still got a long way to go in the medical sciences, but I'm sure as hell glad that I was born at least this far into the process!
Seed's November Booklist
Let's not forget about Hemp: http://books.google.com/books?id=pkMEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA15&#...
I've been hearing really good things about RabbitMQ, and haven't been particularly impressed with SQS. It works at scale (we're currently at 10s of thousands a day, but it's probably the same performance at 100 or 1000x that...) but tasks take many seconds (like 10-30) to show up in the queue, which absolutely kills us.

We'll be adding a RabbitMQ plugin to Norc, just like SQS, when we can.
Mozilla Releases Firefox 3.6 Beta 1
Snow Leopard Update Blocks Intel Atom, Kills Hackintosh
I haven't either, but I see this brought up frequently.
Microsoft: Worms Are Most Prevalent Security Problem
I agree. I feel insulted when somebody asks me to write code during interview.
Wondering whether one can ask the interviewer to write code?
If you don't want students to think in that way, you need to change the system.
This is a habit I picked up, too. It's very rare, though; most people don't do this, and think my code just looks weird. :) But I'd rather see this, than have obscure bugs from accidental assignments.
Renting Scientific Articles
I agree with you. The video is a big turnoff to me. Give me details somewhere in print. I'd bounce off the Zumbox page quickly. It looks more like someone just trying to gather my info to sell.
@everyone - thanks for all the comments. i have incorporated the multiple comments about the data loss scenario being incorrect when using vector clocks. i have been thinking too much about Cassandra lately - and it doesn't use vector clocks. that said - i continue to believe that returning stale reads is bad and best avoided and that unbounded stale-ness is not acceptable for many applications. To the extent that this is an avoidable scenario in a tightly coupled environment within a single data center - i consider it to be a significant drawback.

@jbellis - i hope the responses to your comment have convinced you about the problems with the dynamo quorum scheme/read-write protocols. i can convey that the problems i described definitely do exist in Cassandra. Jun Rao has made this point in the Cassandra public mailing lists a long time back and i have a pointer to the JIRA that he filed in my post as well.

regarding Dynamo being an interesting design space and for the academic community etc. That may very well have been the case - but the reality of the situation is that the world is now overflowing the Dynamo clones with people considering them for all kinds of usages. Hey - if it was good for Amazon (and Facebook and LinkedIn) - it's probably good for me! The people trying to use Dynamo clones do not understand all the small details. They don't understand what applications would be safe to write on it and which would not. I hope my posts (imperfect and opinionated undoubtedly) would provide a counterpoint to this sentiment and make users think harder and deeper before they make the leap.

i was also hoping to trigger a discussion (looks like i succeeded). i hope that it takes us to a better design space than what exists currently.
Yeah, the terminology isn't well-defined.

Jobs start with any tasks that return True when asked due_to_run(), which can be schedule, parents' status, etc.

Glad I could clear it up!
BTW will that work on a 1st gen iPhone? I probably won't get to play around with this code until the weekend.
"give you the option of approving each request to put you on a list" -- uh, I see a huge issue with this. Can you imagine being one of the more popular twitter users being inundated list requests all the time? Also, being on a spammers 'losers' list probably isn't going to do that much damage to your reputation.
"Can jnovek can do some of lloydarmbrust's work so that lloyd can get more time to sell and/or survive at his current job?"

This is a discussion that we haven't had and should. There may be things that I can do to optimize Lloyd's lunch-hour selling.

As far as me doing sales, I am an awful salesman and Lloyd is a very skilled and accomplished salesman. The difference between us is like night and day.

"Forgive my forwardness, but it's my sense that you don't have a financing problem, but rather, a pricing problem."

Keep in mind that we haven't yet developed a novel product -- we are still entering spaces that are occupied by other providers. We have big plans for some novel stuff, but right now we need to cover a few salaries.

While we ARE competing on product quality, most of what makes us competitive is price. Low-price alternatives are very attractive to newspapers right now as their ad revenue continues to decrease steadily. We try to negotiate the maximum price that we think a publication will bear.
We did this at my elementary school when I was a kid!
(My teacher's husband was some kind of a scientist who had access to liquid N)
Hey, that sounds like a good idea all round! It will also let experienced programmers know that they shouldn't bother applying to your shop (where their experience is not going to be recognized and valued).
If it's an option, then there's no problem. It would benefit most people as they are not on many lists.

Damage to your reputation is greater when you are on fewer lists. So this is an important issue for most users.
While it may not exist, there are still people who promote the possibility. In particular the person I am responding to subscribes to the vision enough to believe that some day the user supplied categorization will be sufficient to make Google unnecessary.
On Understanding Data Abstractions
An unmentioned benefit of a dedicated server is that you aren't forced to use Linux. Many support FreeBSD, and a few will allow you to run anything you can install; OpenBSD, NetBSD, x86 Solaris, or even Windows.
I don't get why there are some many overflow.com sites. It was already hard to figure out which overflow.com to post to, and now it's even harder. The only "solution" is to post to them all. Or aggregate them as overflowoverflow.com as someone else suggests so you only need to read & comment on one.