skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Worse is Better

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

Does it suck that bad things happen sometimes (enron)? Yes, but the extra complexity is worse than the original problem.
Rate my startup: Ask My BrainTrust (Business Brainstorming Tool)
While I agree that Sarbanes-Oxley Act is a tremendous burden on business, Enron was criminal fraud perpetrated by the company's executives and the accounting firm that was supposed to be overseeing them. When a company fails transparently, it's typically not an overnight collapse that destroys the entire value of the company.

I think the lesson here is to find a balance between the overreaction that is Sarbanes-Oxley and the criminal frauds that were Enron/Arthur-Anderdon, WorldCom, etc.
> Google says it does recognize the threat. Like Microsoft a decade ago, it has dramatically scaled up its lobbying and public relations efforts.

Hmmmmm.
Short-Term Memory and Web Usability
It wasn't Google that initiated the lawsuit. If this turns out to be a landmine, it will be the publishing industry that planted it.
"Building 100 or so millions of lines of code for the driver part is a herculean task, but the sources at hand claim that they are working on target"

That's quite a driver!
Reading the whole article I cant come to the same conclusion really.

As I read it Google has "sidestepped" the copyright violation via this lawsuit; a step which any other company doing the same thing would also have to do.

It's untested (and therefore somewhat difficult to assert with way) whether anyone else could win a similar lawsuit to attain similar rights. Also it is not yet tested whether publishers could be approached with a license model for orphaned work without it having to go to the courts.

I think granted the exclusive right is simple an opinion; because none of the court documents appear to grant an exclusive right.
Project management: When and how to get users involved
A Learning Studio- Preschool - Home- Program
Tribeca Early Learning Studio- Preschool - NY, NY. A Small Metropolis. Childcare Center
it may have been a subtle joke - considering the post uses spelling tests as an example ;)
Yahoo's How-To Guide For Law Enforcment Seeking Your Data Leaks
Yeah, I had a similar thing happen; bought the laptop in the US, HD failed while I was in Austria, and they had a guy with a new one at my door the next day. I was getting all ready for a fight/hassle/expenditures, but the whole thing was very smooth and professional.
You can find his comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=706346
> I think the lesson here is that people need to become better educated in just how risky the stock market is and consider that before investing anything in it.

Tell that to Warren Buffet.
See the comments here for more $5 locations - http://iheartpgh.com/2009/11/29/5-movies-and-more/
There is also a dollar theater just outside of Pittsburgh. The movies aren't brand new but it is a good deal if you are up for a little drive.
Vpo
Vpo
This!? Was I asleep when "this" meme swept through the internet? Help me out: what do you mean when you say "This."???
Bug Labs Founder and CEO Peter Semmelhack on Bottoms-Up Innovation
Brazil looks to ban video games while U.S. makes ratings work
Mobile DNS Isn't Boring
I don't find it natural to access data via callbacks, especially since data is usually connected (e.g. you need to query for the user, then the settings and then the item):

The node.js documentation also illustrates an example of this when doing sys calls:

posix.rename("/tmp/hello", "/tmp/world").addCallback(function () {
posix.stat("/tmp/world").addCallback(function (stats) {
sys.puts("stats: " + JSON.stringify(stats));
});
});

vs.

posix.rename("/tmp/hello", "/tmp/world").wait();
var stats = posix.stat("/tmp/world").wait();
sys.puts("stats: " + JSON.stringify(stats));

As I understand it the event loop in node.js does not get blocked by calling wait().
Oh nice...I need to update :)
You will be reinventing the wheel; that's part of working with open source on big sites. There just isn't one open-source deployment/backup/versioning/etc system out there. Nearly every large deployment/backup/versioning/etc system i've seen has been custom. Most of these details will be specific to the group you're working with and the project's requirements.

Don't worry so much about getting the process right or finding a pre-packaged solution. The most common solutions will be the same old tools re-worked and customized to get the job done on that site. I'd say the best thing you can do is put your fingers into every single open-source pie you can and get a feel for it all. The rest is a natural evolution of developing for your target platform.
I suspect that something with approximately human equivalent intelligence would require real world embodiment to learn and manipulate things, so it might not even be likely that a super AI could be locked in a box. I guess this embodiment could be limited to senses though (having eyes/ears.. but no arms or evolved weapons like claws etc.. a living head on a table isn't very threatening, and can receive information from the world.. it just can't send much information out to the world, so to speak, in the form of manipulating it with arms or a body).

I guess another possibility could be that there's an artificial polygon (or similar) environment inside the box with it (seems like it'd need something to interact with or intelligence would basically be meaningless and it'd be a helen keller (who couldn't touch or taste either). Maybe in the future we'll have programmed models of the real world that are nearly as rich as it (the matrix) so the robot could 'exist' there until a human decides to embody it in the real world instead. I kinda doubt an artificial world can be nearly as real as the real world though just due to computational irreducibility (for example, if you're in a polygon world and look at stuff with a microscope, you'll see pixels, not molecules). An artificial world and the real world might be too incompatible to transfer an intelligence from one to the other, so maybe the only way a super intelligence could come about is in the real, complex, atom filled world.

The singularity seems like a quasi religion and/or SEO tactic mostly by people who used to play dungeons and dragons.
"Over the next two years we left them in the dust."

You're golden then. There will always be people that try to leech off your success, but you have the ability to get their first.
Before you upvote this, please read the whole article and realize this is just a marketing release from a Rackspace Cloud shill (look at prior submissions).
The best way for you to learn is to do so as you go. Plan an idea, a "big project" without worrying about your skills. Make what you can, learn what you cannot. When you come up with a question Google cannot answer, go ahead and ask it at StackOverflow. They are very nice and do not mind "noob" questions.

That way, you will learn by doing, which is much more pragmatic. However, that does not mean that you should not learn programming theory! Embrace what you can.
Ask HN: Method/Tool to test if a link has already been submitted to HN
I'm a long time observer to HN and just starting to comment and submit. I'm wondering if a method or tool exists to test if a url has already been submitted to HN. I've tried using the url as a search parameter for HN but with no luck. I'm imagining the ability to paste the url (that I intend to submit) into a box, click a button and be told if it is a duplicate. Thanks.
What kind of market do you see here? What features are offered over using a private forum?

I have to admit the idea doesn't "turn me on" all that much; but then I can see the appeal (though I think the pricing is way high).

On the presentation side of things: the sign up page is somewhat confusing with the cheap plan being placed above the others. I actually missed it for a second. Also you have several spelling mistakes hanging around.
The email piece may work pretty well, but the user interface is terrible and the API is worse.
They should have used a fixed width font.
About CST interpolation
I would suggest starting with Google App Engine (the Python version). For the following reasons:

1. Python is a good language to learn. You can use it for other things beside building a web app. GAE is similar to Django.

2. The GAE datastore is easier to fathom than a traditional database. For some reason, I always found databases hard to understand, and it seems that designing schemas for non trivial projects is a separate and distinct skill set from software engineering.

3. GAE solves the updating/patching of working code by providing a sane environment and tools to update and version your app. You can easily switch back to a previous version. Patching datastore schemas is slightly harder.

4. You get scalability out of the box. You don't have to worry about hardware, or even configuring "virtual" instances. None of that. But you probably won't have to worry about scalability for a while.

5. You can easily deploy code to multiple environments. You just need to signup for more apps, and update your app.yaml file to point to a new app name. You can do this in a simple build script.

I hope this helps.

Cheers.
If the URL is identical to one that has already been submitted, your submission will count as an up-vote to the original post.
Agreed. Unfortunately, this is a 'hot topic' on HN... so it'll probably go straight to the top anyway.
Backup your multiple computers to Personal Cloud
How is the situation different from any other deep speciality?

I've never heard of influential people in quantum mechanics trying to get a journal shut down because it published something critical of many worlds.

Or, a consensus opinion under attack by politically motivated non-scientists. What test could be applied, or evidence provided, to tell the difference?

We could, I dunno, hack their email to try and see if they try to suppress dissenting opinions?

We could also try to examine the science to see if it truly is as solid as they argue. Well, actually we can't, since they deleted the data (oops, I mean lost it accidentally, they never acted on the emails in which they said they would delete it)...
Today Google is the only entity with the legal right to do what they do with the books. If I were to try it, I'd be sued into oblivion by the publishers.

For Google, forgiveness was easier than permission. For anyone else, forgiveness won't be an option.

The settlement and ruling applies to Google and only Google. Perhaps in the future some organization will slog through the legal system and change that situation. If that happens, it won't be a monopoly anymore. But today it is.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/04/the-fight-over-the-wo...
(Questions #17 - #21 make the point much better than I am able)
"I can sell only what I like"
Excellent, thanks for the clarification.
Feature request: proxy server support. Right now the script just fails with an urllib2.UrlError. FYI I posted the stack trace here:

http://quandyfactory.com/projects/32/stack_trace_for_hnshpy_...
Thanks for the reply. Yea, the site uses Flash, so that explains it.
Generating Images or Extracting Text from Documents? Docsplit.
http://documentcloud.github.com/docsplit/

It's always been a pain to make documents (PDFs, Word, Excel, etc) displayable and searchable on the web by extracting images and plain text. Docsplit is a command-line utility and Ruby API to help make it a little easier. It wraps the excellent PDFBox, GraphicsMagick, and JODConverter libraries so that you can do things like this:

docsplit images docs/*.pdf --size 700x,50x50 --format gif

docsplit text expenses.doc

docsplit title presentation.ppt
Finally, real security for iPhone and Android
He doesn't tell us how the AI would escape, so there's little to discuss there. But I definitely know how to prevent the AI from escaping: pull the plug.

I wish Eliezer and others would set aside meta-AI (dire predictions and worries about AI, the coming singularity, etc.) and concentrate on the problem of creating AI Guess there's no money in that.

If only someone would pull the plug on this nonsense...
Nitrogen, Riak, and 1,000 Lines of Erlang
Isn't there also quite a difference in scalability? I would expect the Node.js version to support thousands users where is this version is probably only hundreds.

Mainly just a curiosity question, I realize not many people will ever have to deal with thousands of concurrent people chatting.
signed:

Bob Austin, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Hal Lewis, emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara
Will Happer, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Larry Gould, Professor of Physics, Hartford
Roger Cohen, former Manager, <b>Strategic Planning, ExxonMobil</b>

'One of these four is not like the others....'
I'm surprised http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zobrist_hashing wasn't mentioned at all in the article.
Clickable links:

Documentation: http://documentcloud.github.com/docsplit/

Source Code: http://github.dom/documentcloud/docsplit/

Blog Announcement: http://www.documentcloud.org/blog/2009/12/07/announcing-docs...
It is a disproof by counterexample. People claim that if we couldn't trust a superhuman AI to be free in the world, why don't we just lock it in a box and then ask it about cures for cancer and so on? If we just ask it, and all it can do is talk what harm can it do?

They say, all we need to do is say "no" if it asks to be released.

This experiment shows that if you can't resist freeing a human locked in a box, you don't stand a chance against an AI.
With respect to the visual aspects of the landing page, I quite liked the initial screen (title, visual slide, etc. look good). As I scroll down, I also like the concept behind the image vs image check mark for highlighting the strengths of your offering but I would strongly recommend improving the images. Nothing wrong with stick figures but I would redo them and make them more crisp.
Mark the Spot: Tell AT&T where the iPhone sucks
> If that happens, it won't be a monopoly anymore.

I think the problem is the definition of monopoly. It's arguably a very good thing (tm) [for consumers] that Google have done - if the fact they had to fight the legal system in a way that is beyond the means of most companies makes it a monopoly then that, to me, seems a bit screwy logic. What about the argument they have now paved the way for much simpler lawsuits - or even opened the way for people to convince publishers to license content without needing the courts....

Till someone else bothers to try (note: bothers) this is impossible to judge either way.

Also lets be careful here: monopolies aren't necessarily (in a legal sense) "bad". Unfair monopolies are what we have to avoid - and evil ones. This was evidence for Google being an evil corporation; to my eyes it seems hard enough to argue this is really a monopoly let alone one with "evil" intent :)

(ultimately the argument does seem to come down to: Congress needs to fix a silly situation)
From the physicists' letter:

"By now everyone has heard of what has come to be known as ClimateGate, which was and is an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen in our cumulative 223 years of APS membership. For those who have missed the news we recommend the excellent summary article by Richard Lindzen in the November 30 edition of the Wall Street journal, entitled 'The Climate Science isn’t Settled,' for a balanced account of the situation. It was written by a scientist of unquestioned authority and integrity. ..."

"The principals in this escapade have not denied what they did, but have sought to dismiss it by saying that it is normal practice among scientists. You know and we know that that is simply untrue. Physicists are not expected to cheat."
For frontend stuff:

High Performance Web Sites
Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers
(By Steve Souders)
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529307

And for an intro to scalability:

Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications
(By Cal Henderson)
http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Applicatio...
ExxonMobil. Mm.
Interesting, but scary. In this case it looks like an unethical and incompetent competitor. However, if they had actually followed up on the stolen strategy properly, it might have posed a bigger problem.
Google’s Coolest 20% Project: Liquid Galaxy
Save yourself the pain, don't.
Normative writing as wide ranging as 'The Virtues' is quasi-religous and an all or nothing proposition. People are not receptive to having their values changed in such a direct manner.
Company financial statements are like porn to Warren Buffet (his words).

The average investor doesn't do nearly as much research or thinking about their investments.

Meanwhile, brokers and fund companies have a vested interest in making investing seem simple, predictable, and effortless.
Basically I'm trying to get you to find a good mentor. You can learn more in 1 week from a good mentor than you can by reading PDFs and blog posts for two years.

So very true. I got stuck with the latter, and there was a brief period in there where I learned loads from a tutor. World of a difference.
"Roger W. Cohen holds a Ph.D. in physics and is a former Manager of Strategic Planning and Programs for ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Co. He has more than forty years experience in the electronics and energy industries. He is a recent recipient of the Otto Schade Prize for Image Quality for research leading to improved digital television, work that was also recognized by an Emmy in 2000. He is currently working with a group of partners on developing and commercializing a technology for extracting carbon dioxide from the air. Roger lives in Durango ..."

Aspen Global Change Institute website, http://www.agci.org/programs/past_workshop_participants/abou...
Sony Ericsson W205 – Walkman phone for the young active
Things Twitter Taught Me About Media -- and Myself
Whether it's reasonable or unreasonable should not depend primarily on how frightening it is to you.
instead of a small icon in the systray and a notification, you now get update-manager appearing on top of whatever it is you're doing. A backwards step.

I can't wait to upgrade my inlaws' LTS machin to the newer releases for exactly this reason. They never notice the icon in the tray, but they'll do something about the updates window...
Is the source going to be made available?
No, I simply found it the easiest way to test understanding of pass-by-value vs pass-by-ref.
Updating and patching a server running a web app without down time is an art. And, there's not a ton of stuff out there about django deployment best practices. Here's a few thoughts from a fellow developer:

Python has a decent way to isolate deployed apps using virtualenv. If you google virtualenv django, you should find some interesting reading.

For automated python deployment on unix boxen, fabric seems to be the state of the art. You might also want to take a look at capistrano on thr ruby on rails side. You'll probably find a lot more interesting reading about deployment tips and tricks by reading stuff from ruby/rails land. (Don't flame me) The Rails guys have historically had more problems with speed and scaling rails, so there's a lot more information out there. They've also built some really cool tools to deal with those problems.

Django has some really cool caching features. I was just playing around with caching and load testing http://newsley.com by throwing ghetto localmem caching on top of my main view, I got an order of magnitude more pages served per second. I didn't even try memcached as a backed yet, but I feel a lot better knowing the basics of how to do that if the need arises. Regardless, you'll want to spend a bit of time learning the caching tools anfd reading about memcached if you're interested about scaling django.

A lot of scaling web apps is about scaling a database. It's routinely the slowest part of your web app. You shouls be able to find a lot of reading about that. The highavailability blog is a great resource for that stuff.

Cal henderson (founder of flikr) wrote a great book called "building scalable websites" if I'm not mistaken.
Change Your Life 5x5p5 Goals Booklet for Achieving Goals
It would be interesting to see if you could put this together using just the Google Street View API

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/services.html...

I don't see any particular reason why not (though it might not be so smooth)
As the API docs note, wait() can be problematic: "If any other promises are created and made to wait while the first promise waits, the first promise’s wait will not return until all others return. The benefit of this is a simple implementation and the event loop does not get blocked. Disadvantage is the possibility of situations where the promise stack grows infinitely large because promises keep getting created and keep being told to wait()."

You could get around the lack of naturalness by using something like MethodChain [1] to allow you to write code like this:

posix.rename("/tmp/hello", "/tmp/world")
.stat("/tmp/world")
._(function() {
sys.puts("stats: " + JSON.stringify(this));
});

http://jsclass.jcoglan.com/methodchain.html
Although cperciva pointed out [1] that this is probably due to a bug in bsdiff. Still, decompiling executables to compress them better is pretty damned nifty. The fact that there are people who know how to do this on a non-mission-critical project @ Google definitely shows the level of talent there.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=706496
Original title is 'Ask and you shall receive'
No, they're completely clueless about it. There's no doubt about that.

I attended a mac users' group meeting once in which an Apple rep tried to convince us that their SAN system was better than Dell's because of the price... I looked on with contempt because he was ignoring the thing that you're getting from Dell: support.

Sure enough, when Apple started hyping their big mac installation, they obsessed with their price compared to Dell's... completely ignoring the fact that Dell's price included installation, a 3-year on-site support contract, a building release, and even network setup (hardware).

And then when I worked for a company that made MacBook Pros an option for developers, the IT staff ended up hating them. Their prices were 2x that of the Dell laptops with comparable configurations, and Apple couldn't handle support at all -- when the IT guys contacted support for a recall, the support staff at Apple were lost when our guys had 50 laptops to send back...

Naturally, when I heard that Dell was outsourcing customer service to India, I stopped buying Dell. (They couldn't outsource their corporate support to India... fortunately for them -- I suspect that if they had, they'd have lost a lot of bids to IBM and HP.)
We're seeing a couple of markets here, the "business advisory board for the business owner" market being the most pormising one. It's too early to tell which ones will pan out.

This really falls into the category of "Forum 2.0" -- except we offer a fully hosted solution, no pain to set up, and most importantly, a much better user interface for having meaningful private discussions with the people you trust the most.

It also introduces the element of consensus building through voting, which Forums have no concept of today -- making your discussions not only a healthy debate but also one that is productive and helps reach an informed decision.
What we're seeing is that there is politics in science, like everything else that people do.

If a former association with ExxonMobil by one of the signatories casts doubt on the motivations of these scientists, then you have to apply the same standard to scientists who are affiliated with or have taking funding from any so-called "green energy" businesses or social progressive political groups
How many times does he need to use the word "robust"?
Can OpenID Be Commercialized? Investors Bet $3.25 Million On JanRain
Lazyfeed’s New Realtime Interface Tips Into Information Overload