skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Glass-Steagall covers the specific case of banks that accept deposits. This is where the average Joe Schmoe sends their paycheck.

Yes there are multiple agent principle conflicts associated with securities, but that is ok, because people that invest with securities should be able to know, understand and value the risks. This is not true of the average plumber, electrician or waiter. You cannot expect them to understand the complexities of international finance and all the byzantine securities banks sell and buy just to be able to judge whether an individual bank is safe to deposit your pay check in.

Thus, we can either have a system where some regulation exists that ensures that depositor's money is safe or we can say buyer beware, which means that after being burned a couple of times the average person will simply not trust and not use the banking system. This is actually what happened after the crash of 1929 and before Glass Steagall was passed and the FDIC was set up.

We know from that period that if ordinary people do not use the banking system, enormous amounts of capital are simply not put to work (i.e., they are stowed away under matresses, etc.) and the economy contracts greatly.

So that we have discovered that it is generally beneficial for the government to insure the bank deposits of ordinary people up to a certain amount. This is something that happens in pretty much every modern industrialized nation nowadays.

Now it is obvious that if the government is to insure certain banks, it should take steps to make sure that these banks are safe, and that is what the requirements of Glass Steagall are all about. Of course Glass Steagall allows for banks that do not take deposits (i.e., investment banks) to invest in as much securities as they want and to generally to engage in much riskier behaviour.
I have been doing my pet projects in Drupal. I don't have much experience in the other options you mention, however.

One thing I consider, is that side projects tend to die from lack of interest. If there is a person who might also work on it as a side project with you, using what they are willing to learn or already know might trump technical considerations.
No mention of Reddit?

I have always assumed that the HN comment system was more or less a clone of Reddit's. Maybe I'm wrong though.
I assume that maybe the abortion is too expensive or the check is. This might only be happening in rural (i.e. poor) areas. I don't know all of the details.

In the example that I saw of one of these orphanages, the girls were all in their teens. Maybe this is a problem of the past (due to newer tech)?
Interesting how a simple policy can lead to large imbalances in the natural population (at many levels: SBR, social, labor, etc). Wonder what other policies that other countries have instituted that lead to similar manifestations?
FYI: This video vastly understates the volume and variety of delicious microbrews available in the city.
I think Redbox is part of a bigger trend: automation will destroy tons of service jobs and "hurt" a lot of established industries in the process. Blockbuster/Redbox is a good example. I can replace a 5000 sq ft store and 10 employees with a kiosk that takes up a few sq ft. Selection might not be as good, but it's good enough for most people.

Or take your typical restaurant. There's almost no reason that 95% of the waitstaff couldn't be replaced by ordering kiosks at each table. It would reduce errors and reduce costs. Or what about convenience stores? Figure out which items make up 90% of your sales, put them in an automated kiosk and put one on every street corner. You're now selling almost as much (or maybe even more) with dramatically lower costs.

I think it's a good thing overall, but there will definitely be some big losers economically from such a dramatic shift.
The earth continues to orbit the sun, puppies still lick your hand and scientists barely notice crap like this getting scattered about. The Internet is chock full of it.

Yet we are to believe the AGW crowd zealously hoards their taxpayer-funded data sets because they fear this kind of work will result and it will engender bad publicity and tarnish all their efforts.

Or maybe they have something more solid to fear.
"Never fight a land war in Asia." ...unless you have 30 million single, angsty, poorly educated men...
Ance Causing Stress And Problems
I had to look it up so hopefully this is helpful to someone else:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm
Forget about the device; I don't think there is any 3G data plan for $20/month.
I'm currently reading Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Outliers:
http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwel...

It's a fascinating account of what makes people successful. Major points I've picked up so far:

* the contribution of IQ to success maxes out at around 120; beyond that, IQ points don't matter much, because you're smart enough to get by.

* What Robert Sternberg nicknames "practical intelligence" (http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/practicalintelligence.shtml) is extremely important to overall success. Affluent and middle-class parents tend to be much better at passing this sort of intelligence along to their kids than lower-income ones.

* Seemingly irrelevant details like birthdate play a major role too. He shows how the day you were born has >10% contribution to academic success, because if you don't make the cutoff date for going to school, you'll be one of the older, and thus more mentally mature individuals in your class. Consequently, these individuals are more likely to be selected for gifted programs. And because of the academic grooming, they end up being more likely to go to college. He also shows how, for example, professional Canadian hockey players are almost never born in the later months of the year for similar reasons; if you don't make the cutoff date, you'll be one of the older players on your team, and scouts will confuse your increased maturity for inborn talent and you'll move up the ranks and get better training as a result.

It's a somewhat disturbing book because it shows how success isn't a direct function of an individual's aptitude. But I think it's also important, because, by observing these factors, you can hack your way into success even if the factors are going against you.
Yeah, but why not use this article as an opportunity to rant about something he is too cool to get?
> The lack of marriageable women is a problem that can be solved by time. Men are prepared to marry at 40 if their work prospects are good.

This is a very naive conclusion. Human societies deal reasonably well with a large female:male ratio (usually after a war) but large male:female ratios usually leads to war, revolution, or unpleasant social changes like fast increases in violent crime rates and similar problems. This has happened in the past on smaller scales, but in this case you are talking about regions with 10s of millions of young men who have almost no chance at reaching the societal norm of a wife and child -- they are not going to be pleased when the reality of the situation starts to make itself apparent.

If men are prepared to wait until they are older and richer then you will find this cohort out-competing their younger, poorer peers for an ever-dwindling supply of young women. This just leads to a repetition of the cycle but with more and more competitors fighting over the pool of "resources."

This is not a situation that is just going to fix itself unless there is a radical change to family planning laws, societal norms, the role of women, etc. The only thing that can really be said is that the solution will be painful and its consequences could end up being quite far-reaching...
Portable ultrasound machines is the reason. Now it is cheap and easy to determine fetus gender, rather than waiting for the child to be born before you decide to abandon it.
"Through locally determined birth targets, vigilant surveillance of prospective mothers, and state pressures ranging from the threat of job loss to crippling financial penalties and involuntary forced abortion, the policy has already driven China's birth rate far down—below the replacement level"

So what about the countries where the birth rate went below the replacement level naturally, without government intervention? Are they facing the same problems in the future as China or not, and why?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility

Today about 42% of the world population lives in nations with sub-replacement fertility.[citation needed]

The countries or areas that have the lowest fertility are Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Taiwan, Ukraine and Lithuania.
Yeah it's rather difficult to check the sex of a child before it's conceived.
How exactly is this a simple policy?
Have you tried reducing your hours? I find it difficult to concentrate after 7 hours. If you can reduce to 35 hours a week, you might notice drastic improvements.
Programming Wisdom Center
I have no idea what'll work for you.

For me, I started in I.T. at 16, did the corporate thing by 19, and at 24 became a climbing instructor.

It was great. The pay was crap, but I learned a lot about people and group management and all kinds of other things that I just don't think most hackers ever have to deal with. I mean, how often do you get to practice talking to a 6-year-old that's climbed to the top and refuses to let go?

After a few years in the outdoor industry I returned to computer systems, much more well-balanced I think.

I don't see much personal value in moving from programming to something tangential to program. Diametric opposition, now that's much more fun.
How about taking a break at work? Or four?
Dell reveals it has made $6.5m out of Twitter
Unfortunately this has nothing to do with the mind, I could easily hack for a day straight with some good coffee, barring the pain. You do bring up a good point however...I'd gladly work twenty hours if I could support myself on it, but in this industry I've never come across such a thing except for interns and such.

Now what I'd love to do is go live somewhere cheap overseas if I could get interesting work outsourced (esp. development of significant JS software), but that sounds like a pipe dream.
I do, and I do.
The contract isn't required, but I use it to get the best deal. And if you do the reserved instance the EC2 instances get pretty cheap.

Upgrading hardware involves more downtime, and it's not anywhere near as easy to scale back down if I need to.
How much money is he donating?
What iron_ball said, plus a share of "I agree so strongly that I almost want to just repeat everything you said".

Alternately, it could mean: "I was reading LiveJournal five minutes ago, and haven't quite finished switching over to the Hacker News house style." ;)
This is somewhat similar to a site I have been working on. http://www.newsdive.net I am doing filtering based on story content, but this seems to be based on tags and categories more.
Eatin’ Fresh: Why Subway Will Surpass McDonald’s
Have you considered Dragon Naturally Speaking? Ask @benjyfeen about it, he works in SRE at Google. My understanding is his carpal tunnel got so bad that he had to stop typing 4 or 5 years ago, and went through some intensive training with Dragon Naturally Speaking. Now he's able to do all of his work without a keyboard.
Found this site: shotgunrules.com

It uses the same text & sells a pocketbook.
Just one comment about the x86 instruction set: Right is wrong. I'm just amazed at the engineers at Intel who are getting out with this horrible instruction set (horrible, and the same time - the only assembly instruction set that I can read & write) :)
50 Viral Images (and how they spread) [2008]
Which is kind of insane, given that Shopify is based in Canada.
"Its just as difficult, if not MORE difficult to setup a ec2 instance than buying a dedicated server."

Is this from experience? If so, please share it.
MySpace Kills Off Imeem API Without Warning Developers
I came to appreciate exception handling, after spending quite some time with Common Lisp.
there are some sites marketing paid video tutorials, maybe you could team up there?
Incredible Underground Residence in Switzerland
Never heard of Stainless before. Thanks!
Teach english abroad, and do some freelance here and there for extra income
Sorry, but no. Left arm (right from the observer's POV) is orangoutan-sized, while the other (closer to the viewer) appears too small and thin in comparison, even accounting for perspective. Hip bone goes way too high, and thorax is amorphously portrayed in comparison. Neck starts behind guy's back. Head outline is missing.

The thing that bites guy's ass is ridiculously sized if a lion was intended, and that front leg looks more human than animal (then again, he might be going for some mythological chimera-ish thing).

Overall, the drawing is confusing and I can't make out what many of the lines in the legs/ground area are supposed to represent.

Finally, this is not a casual doodle. Lines were drawn and refined several times over. If he was going for manierism or El Greco-ish stylization, fair enough, but still proves little about his ability to draw. If he was trying to achieve a render true to anatomy and perspective, I call fail.

I don't know whether Cézanne could draw or not, but I don't think this works as evidence that he could.
do you have a list of those sites?
Because you can state it in one sentance.

Compare it to an ETS or something similar. You could create the laws for a one-chile policy very very simply.
Purely anecdotal, but I had fairly severe wrist Tendonitus on and off. I starting taking vitamin B-6 (and occasionally B-12), haven't had trouble since.
Oh well, the old cost argument again.
As a satisfied EC2 customer [who also happens to be fully able to use a calculator] I'm happy to take these apart, again and again.

Bandwidth is ridiculously expensive with them. You can get 3-4x cheaper per megabit going dedicated.

Yes. But that does not normally matter. Bandwidth has become ridiculously cheap either way; a terabyte sets you back a measly hundred bucks on amazon. And if you're pushing more than a few dozen of them then most of it is very likely going over a CDN (or a set of separate dedicated servers) anyways.

Remember sites pushing 2-digit terabytes of dynamic html are very rare. And everything else can be trivially offloaded (e.g. to one of the isp's you advocate).

Servers are crazy expensive. Compare the most powerful machine they have vs something on 10tb / gigenet / theplanet for the price. You will definitely end up with a more powerful machine for half the price on either.

Well, I did and came back underwhelmed - as usual.
Yes, you can go cheaper for a comparable spec, sometimes as much as 50 bucks. But again - that only matters when you're a small shop with 1-3 servers, looking to cut the penny.

Once your business grows out of that the hosting fees turn into a rounding error either way, and the advantages EC2 offers are nothing to sneeze at (ever looked what an solution equal to EBS costs elsewhere?).

Its no more difficult to setup a normal dedicated server than it is a EC2 box.

That's a red herring. Provisioning is automated in any reasonable sized deployment and you face the exact same problems with dedicated hardware that you have with amazon. Plus the hassles of having to babysit said hardware...

There is exactly one argument against amazon today and that is when you need hosts with lots of memory. RAM is expensive in the cloud, for obvious reasons - to a degree where stuffing your own hardware with 64G starts to look like a bargain. But the thing about this argument is: Very few applications really need that amount of RAM in a single box. In most cases the root cause for such a requirement is simply a flaw in your architecture.
Cuil's shtick is that they don't store any search history http://www.cuil.com/
While the earth-to-moon latency might be high, the throughput would probably still be decent - I don't think sending DVDs would be cheaper.
Everyone says this, how does one pursue it? I speak Spanish very well.
Wow, that's ridiculously well timed; my wife and I need to make a decision tomorrow about moving across the country to Portland!
Seconding the freelance half. I'm only 16, so my pay isn't there yet, but I get the idea that most professional consultants could pretty easily support a modest lifestyle working half-time.
I have been building a site which does this for news, with plans to allow arbitrary feeds.

http://www.newsdive.net
It has to pay the store well enough to cover the cost of the Safeway manager standing in front of the machine, scratching his head when it jams up.
As much as I like FreeBSD, and as much as I prefer the BSD license to the GPL, everytime I think about it, I reach the same conclusion: the BSD License is flawed.

Because of the GPL, Linux has companies like Red Hat committing 25% of the new code base. Companies have to improve the product, and Linux can evolve without direct funding.

The BSD license allows Apple and others to shamelessly rip code out of the product and put very little in, thus relying on a small community of developers and donations to keep running. It's a shame really, since FreeBSD is such a better product with so much potential. And all we can really do is support it through programs like this.
more science:

"Hypovitaminosis D is a deficiency of Vitamin D."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypovitaminosis_D

"Vitamin D"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D

"Recently, Cannell and colleagues have suggested that vitamin D deficiency is a major risk factor for influenza and that vitamin D may be effective in reducing influenza incidence and severity."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D_and_influenza
Understanding Amazon Dynamo by Building it in Erlang
I freelanced full-time for a year and it's a very difficult way to support oneself. For every hour you bill, unless you have a very good thing going, you'll also spend an hour following leads and an hour dealing with organizational crap. It's really the worst of both worlds and I'm trying to kill off the business that formed over that year as best I can, without pissing off existing clients.

To get enough jobs to support yourself, you end up undercharging. And the business can't scale because most people you'd consider subcontracting to either charge astronomical rates or are god-awful: There's a surprising dearth of people who know their stuff.
The amount you pay for a "small" instance on EC2 is the same price as a machine you can get with gigenet that is more powerful than the "Large" instance.

That is simply false. No idea what kind of beef you have with amazon but please get your facts straight.

You seem to consequently ignore that with amazon you not only pay for a piece of hardware but also for the flexibility and infrastructure that comes with it.

Yes, your cheapo host might give you a gig more RAM and a few more megahertz for your dollar - but it doesn't have equivalents to EBS, S3, CloudFront, instant provisioning and all the other goodies that make EC2 worthwhile.

It will probably also not give you means to recover within minutes when your shiney, dedicated pizza box decides to blow a fuse.
Ask HN: Lala Land Grab?
I just had a thought. Apple bought Lala, and I've spent probably about $50-$100 on Lala for music. This is a pretty big music library since albums are so cheap. I've gotten in the flow of listening to Lala every day and I'm always adding more music. I love it.

Now, the speculation is that Apple is going to turn Lala into a streaming iTunes product. Knowing Apple's iTunes price points, I'm very skeptical that they will keep the prices where they are on Lala. With the inevitable iPhone app, Apple is surely going to position the iTunes streaming service as just as good, if not better than buying the music as it is now. To see them then offer a 10x price cut over buying the track in full would just cannibalize the iTunes store.

It seems clear Apple will be stuck grandfathering in everyone's Lala collection, otherwise they'll alienate all current Lala users from iTunes (myself included.) Nevermind the horrible press they'd get if suddenly hundreds of thousands of dollars of music is ripped from the hands of Lala users. But, they are going to almost certainly have higher prices for future purchases than Lala has now.

My conclusion: it might be time to buy as much cheap Lala music as you can until they can launch the iTunes streaming service. Worst case, you're out $100 or whatever you want to blow. (If its any consolation, if you lose this money because Apple screws everyone over, Apple will probably go down with you!) Best case, you end up with a nice music library you can listen to anywhere that will go up in value tenfold in a few weeks.

Also, if you haven't uploaded your music collection to Lala, you should probably do it now. I'd be shocked if Apple grandfathers in uploaded tracks too, but who knows!
it is illegal in china to check the sex of an unborn child (of course if you pay enough at private clinics, you can still do it). Public hospitals probably will not dare to do it.
I think that you are missing the value of the opposite proposition - that you are able to turn it off and stop paying. This is an obvious value to someone who needs to be able to scale sideways, but having essentially no cost for provisioning and de-provisioning allows you to do things for development, testing and operations you cannot do without great expense outside of it. I worked at a number of banks 10 years ago and we can get the same functionality now for a few bucks that we did then by buying far too many spare E3500s.

We have a decent sized EC2 architecture right now and EBS snapshotting + provisioning on demand means that we can get all of the benefits of multiply redundant hardware at a fraction of the cost.

- We never need to upgrade software in place. Software gets freshly installed on a new cluster that duplicates our existing cluster and gets a increasing portion of traffic. Failover is as simple as a proxy cutover. The freedom to do config changes or 3rd party software upgrades and be able to just swap instances in and out enables us to experiment often and safely with production changes.

- Slave gets corrupted or falls out of sync with the master? A machine suffers a degraded disk? Bad net interface? Don't fix, replace.

- We can spin up an entire test stack that precisely mirrors our prod stack to stress test with significant cash outlay. Since this cost is low, we can stress test often and test the effect of s/w and config changes on performance easily. Stress tests the H/W outlays associated with them are traditionally hugely expensive if you want to test exactly like you run.

- Significant database migrations can take place on a slave that is easily promoted, snapshotted and cloned without having to deal with any long term ping ponging between instances.

- Copies of databases can be instantly provisioned and destroyed for data analysis needs. If analysis needs peak at 5x in a week, no one has to wait. Run 5 copies and shut them all off when you're done.

These are just a few quick things that we do with regularity. And I'm sure there are lots more opportunities to exploit these capabilities than we are thinking of.

Also - in terms of cost - don't forget to compare against reserved instance pricing.
peepcode.com is one.
This is an unfortunate misconception. Some of Apple's significant BSD/MIT/Apache contributions, off the top of my head:

* LLVM and clang (MIT) - http://llvm.org/

* libdispatch, aka GCD (Apache) - http://libdispatch.macosforge.org/

* launchd (Apache) - http://launchd.macosforge.org/

* OpenBSM (BSD) - http://www.trustedbsd.org/openbsm.html

* mDNSResponder (Apache/BSD) - http://developer.apple.com/opensource/internet/bonjour.html

Nearly all the code to the base system is available under the non-BSD APSL, but the fact is that most of it just isn't useful to the BSDs, and if it were, Apple would likely be open to contributing the code under an alternative license (eg, they re-licensed launchd under the Apache license):

http://www.opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1062/