skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"E for Effort I suppose, but it's seeming less and less relevant, and if major releases are this buggy I can see why."

This is my feeling too: I used a version (1.x? 2?) on OS X for a little while after switching, then started using Mail.app, which has its quirks and problems -- it used to slow when mailboxes got stuffed with thousands of messages -- but shows a level of polish Thunderbird doesn't.
Ask HN: How does noProCrast Work?
Just curious how the anti-procrastination setting works, specifically how does the timer define being on HN. It seems to me that even when I navigate away from HN the timer is still going.
I know that this wasn't your question, but I was having this same problem for a while... My wrists and arms hurt like hell while I was at work, it was really awful.

I get made fun of for it now, but what I did was take two keyboards, and use one for each hand. Spreading my arms apart so that my wrists weren't cocked out really helped me...so much so that I've been able to go back to one keyboard (my trusty IBM model M). Think more about hugging your monitor than poking it in the stomach (if that makes any sense...I mean the orientation of your hands).

The other thing that I did was replace my regular mouse with a trackball. (A kensington expert mouse [http://blog.nongraphical.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/expe...).

I really enjoy coding...so it wasn't so much a "what else can I do" situation for me, it was a "how can I keep doing this".
From the outside hard work can seem like an addiction and this is what DHH is seeing. What I see are people that are passionate about their work and passionate about succeeding - - they breathe startups just like a upcoming basketball player breathes basketball. And yes, there are some that don't exercise, don't eat healthy, that ruin their friendships - - but I doubt these people would improve their habits by doing something else...
So does all mono compiled applications for unix/mac. It's just an extension. It might be what you have said, but unless verified. It isn't.

Picasa for example is emulated through wine on Linux/Mac, but that's because it was developed originally for Win32.
Think Positive. Be Positive. Stay Positive.
> same problem for a while... My wrists and arms

Neck muscles, shoulder, upper back. The problem derives from starting in one direction and needing my arms to be braced enough to be quick to the keys. I've tried all sorts of different postures and what not, seen my chiropractor a few times, etc., but nothing helps the problem other than being away from the computer for a while.
Hold the amusement--the third project for the class is (of course) a Scheme -> CPS -> C compiler:

http://matt.might.net/teaching/fall-2009-advanced-compilatio...

Naturally, students are required to implement call/cc.

And, in my static analysis class last spring, project 2 was CPS conversion + 0CFA:

http://matt.might.net/teaching/spring-2009-programming-langu...

-Matt
I think a more likely scenario is they shut it down, give everyone iTunes store credit for the amount they spent on streaming-only songs and if you bought MP3s, you're OK since they don't have DRM. Sounds like a much cheaper solution than trying to run the service. They bought it for the talent, why would they waste that talent maintaining the existing site instead of building something new? Also, lala's contracts with the record companies aren't transferable and there's no way Apple can negotiate the same terms. The record companies don't want iTunes to dominate the market, it's bad for them.

I'm a heavy lala user and LOVE the service, but spend your money elsewhere.
i really like their design and the content focus is niche, but a good one.
Gestures Interfaces [video]
Nevermind. Not relevant. Thanks for the clarification.
I quite like the iPhone's compromise: it stores and indexes the most recent 50 or so messages, and when searching provides a "Continue search on server" button. Thunderbird (or others) could have a larger store of recent messages, but this would avoid downloading thousands of mailing list emails.
Ctrl+B (or Command+B on the Mac, I assume) opens up a bar at the top (or at least it does in the Linux version) and you can drag your bookmarks between the bar and the "other bookmarks" folder.
How much money is he donating?

That's between me and the FreeBSD Foundation. I don't feel that me making a charitable donation should require me to divulge what I consider to be private personal information.
Please don't take offense to this, but what kind of shape are you in? I found that losing some weight really helped my back problems.
My mistake. I wrongly assumed Chrome OS did not include X11 when I read that they used a new window system.
Yes, many countries with low birth rates are facing the same problems. This long NYT Magazine article from 2008 has some interesting stories from different countries (mostly in Europe):

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/magazine/29Birth-t.html?_r...
Ask HN: Is black-hat hacking harder now than it was 20 years ago?
As a kid I was fascinated with stories of people hacking into high security places like the pentagon. But I recently realized that, while this was surely no walk in the park even 20 years ago, it must have been easier then that it is now. Things like ssh or vpn weren't around back then, and even though I'm sure they had equivalents, they were probably proprietary and thus not as secure as today's time-tested open source solutions. What do you think?
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.

That's not really a safe assumption. I work with several real-world, profitable sites whose monthly bandwidth usage range from 50Mbps to 2Gbps at 95th percentile, and they push enough custom content that CDNs are overly complex and still not priced competitively. Their respective business models would not be viable if they ran on Amazon. I just helped one of them acquire a pair of GigE uplinks, one of which they're paying $1,500/month for the other they're paying $3k/month for. Assuming they can see 800Mbps out of each link, that's $7 and $14/TB of xfe. This compared to Amazon's "measly $100" ..
I'm 5'11" and ~150lb and I get exercise regularly. I've tried all sorts of things to further strengthen my back and upper body over the past couple years (and to improve its flexibility), but judging by the enduring pain, fitness is not a factor here.
Taiwan has tealit.com. I'm sure most countries have something similar.
Cheapo host? Theplanet and others have significantly more servers and datacenters than amazon.

Most servers sold from either provider come with 1-2TB of bandwidth. How much does 2TB of bandwidth cost on amazon again? Right.

I already said /multiple times/ that the other amazon services are well worth it. I only said EC2 /in my mind/ is not worth it, unless its for your overflow. If you have a static need for a server- As in, a webserver that will always be on, Then you are better off getting a dedicated. The bandwidth will cost less. The server itself will cost less. You will get more processing power.. You will get more RAM.

You will not get instant provisioning. But then again, I dont randomly change the specs on my webservers now either way.
Sure. I use EC2 to handle our overflow during peak hours. I had to literally look up guides to dealing with it. Its not exactly straight forward how the IP system works, and figuring out all the ec2 specific crap, images and storing the image in S3, etc. etc.
I think over the past few years the entrepreneur was in more power than the VC. From a global economic stand point global savings far exceeds global investment by a lot. So you have a lot of capital in the system searching for yield.You would hear so many investors saying there is enough capital, but not enough "good" ideas. This need to find yield for all this capital created a lot of risk taking behavior. Money was cheap and easy to get over the years and that was probably the best time to get funding.
Absolutely. 20 years ago telcos didn't bother adding password protection to digital "switches" because they didn't even consider war dialers or the proliferation of internal documentation through bulletin boards. Unix vendors like Microsoft (Xenix), SCO, and Sun left password-less accounts (like Root, Operator, Sync) on workstations which were then immediately plugged into a shared-bus network. Not to mention the wide-open nature of the various X.25 networks like Sprintnet which were used for inter-bank communications.
Perhaps, but even this will result in a huge backlash. Today I have 50-100 albums I can listen to anywhere, and Apple is going to take those away from me and say "Oh, but you can now have 10"? Somehow I don't think this will fly.
Toledo Computer Repair Services
If your kid spilled milk or juice in your keyboard of laptop or computer and your computer got froze, you become panic because you have to wait for weeks to get your computer or laptop problem fixed . Now don’t need to worry, just call us, we will fix issue same day or maximum 48 hours at very reasonable rate.
I have a question about D-Wave. I've been trying to follow their progress in building multi-qubit adiabatic quantum computers for years now, and I see Google is working with them now too. But this blog entry states that it's hard to work out if D-Wave's hardware is really a quantum computer. Why is it so hard? I mean after all these years they still can't tell if it's actually working?
You're right: calling it "very easy" was overstating things to the point of absurdity. I do think Java's behavior has a big advantage in being easier to understand than the theory behind it is ("less than 10%"), but I had completely glossed over the "roughly half" point the first time I read this, and it really hurts my claim that Java's approach is trivial to understand.

That said, I stand by "not requiring that knowledge". Java's behavior is understandable without having to know about value and reference semantics. That doesn't mean it doesn't require any knowledge. Specifically, I think it requires two points: (1) Variables are just names, so reassigning a variable doesn't change anything else in the system; (2) When you call a method on an object, you might change that object.

In support of this: I've also been doing a lot of interviews recently. In my (admittedly limited) experience, the people who have had trouble with Java's parameter passing behavior are more experienced developers who've done a lot of work in other languages. Their confusion isn't from Java's behavior, it's the caution about pass-by-reference that they've brought over from C and C++. I don't really see junior people making this mistake. So I suspect having just a little knowledge of the value vs. reference issue makes Java harder to understand, by bringing up new and confusing possibilities.

But, like I said, my experience is limited. If you do see new developers being confused by this aspect of Java (or Python, Ruby, or other languages with similar semantics), I'd be interested to hear about it.
Social Objects: Notes on Knitting in America
Some of the problems can be alleviated if you don't assume that people stop working at 64. If people kept working at an older age, and that age kept increasing, the workforce size could stay stable, and possibly even grow.

The unmarried men problem is unsolvable barring a war. (And with the very very low death rates of wars these days, even that might not "help".)

Expect to see china legalize prostitution soon. They are almost not going to have a choice.

There is one other effect you will see. There is going to be intense competition for wives in china. Only the best will get one. Over time this natural selection should have very interesting implications for china.

I'm not sure what women in china look for (height? looks? brains?), (I'm not going to assume it's the same as in other countries). But whatever it is, these women will be shaping china's future.

One thing you should not expect is a dramatic change. It will be gradual, very very gradual. So I guess people will adjust.
I think the difference might be that in China, the TFR is regulated, while the nation's economy is growing rapidly.

In a declining economy, it would make sense that fewer children are being born, since the parents on average can't support as many, but in a growing economy, we would usually see many more children being born because times are good, and parents can afford to care for more children - something that isn't being allowed in China.

Also keep in mind that according to that Wikipedia article, the US is also below the replacement level. I think the article intends to focus more on the social implications that the policy has.
God damn, if I ever have a product to sell, I want box art like that.
I appreciate the thought regardless, I'm sure 95% of problems like these are wrist/hand-related.
Marijuana might cause new cell growth in the brain
10 Futuristic User Interfaces [2008]
Well, I'd call that a corner case - but I may stand corrected.

2Gbps is indeed a different ballpark. For most sites I have seen in that realm it would be ~90% static content (i.e. media). If your site truly needs to hit logic for each of these requests then yes, a distributed solution probably won't do there.

Anyways, I didn't mean to say that EC2 is the be-all for everything. I just wanted to place a counterpoint against that all too common, lighthearted cost-bashing which too often is not backed up by figures that make sense the way yours do.
The author mentions 'key behavioral genes'. Does anyone know more about these?
Online map of Chile hotels booking service by
FWIW: I did cure my dad's incapacitating back problems when I was 17 using six months of daily massage and some aggressive gymnastics-based stretching techniques to get his flexibility within normal range of motion in about 2 weeks. Just mentioning it in case it sparks a new thought for you. Otherwise, carry on and good luck in your job hunt.
Bad luck, then :(.

Sorry to hear that... Are you in a position where money isn't playing a huge factor? Something that I have always had in the back of my head to do after I "retire" is to teach. Once you finish your degree (didn't see if you said post grad?) you'll be eligible to teach in some states (I know you can in IA if you have a Bachelor's in anything).
Thanks, it appears I was just plain wrong. Off to reconfigure some networks.
"A measly hundred buck"? I didnt know we dont care about cash anymore. My whole argument is that the advantages of EC2 dont outweigh the cost benefit. When you say things like that then sure, go nuts. I have some monster cables to sell you also, superior quality for sure.

I wouldnt say text sites pushing over a TB are rare. I have a few myself doing over that ( petitionspot.com does 2+ TB a month ) - That particular site runs on a 5520 QC with 6 gigs of ram and 10tb transfer for 200$ a month )

If I was to put that same site on EC2, I would be paying significantly more, as I doubt even the large instance could handle it. 1.2ghz opterons are not exactly speed demons.

For the sake of argument, lets say the Large Instance could handle it though.

Pricing at 34 cents a hour = 252.96 a month
Bandwidth costs, 2TB = 340.00 a month

So we can either pay 592.96 for a less powerful machine, Or 200, for one that has 8TB more bandwidth to play with, and has roughly twice the processing power. In case you are feeling frisky, you can upgrade the ram to 12gb for 75$ a month. Still significantly cheaper.

https://orders.gigenet.com/index.php?order=true&form=235... Heres a link to the server I mention above.
I hate commenting when I have nothing of real value to add, but I just wanted to say this is wonderful and I hope you get some new customers out of it.
Tutorial: Design an iPod Icon in Adobe Fireworks
And Twitter has made $0 from Dell.
I've been wondering for a while now why China doesn't back off to a two-child policy. Most of the problems caused by the one-child policy would go away or be greatly eased, and yet the population would still attain stasis. I've put it down to organizational inertia.

Really, given that population trends in most countries are headed towards or are under replacement level, they could probably just ditch the n-child policy altogether, but I don't think the government of China is capable of making such a momentous change any time soon.
> I'm not sure what women in china look for (height? looks? brains?), (I'm not going to assume it's the same as in other countries). But whatever it is, these women will be shaping china's future.

They look for wealth. Most would probably want to lift themselves out of poverty.

> The unmarried men problem is unsolvable barring a war. (And with the very very low death rates of wars these days, even that might not "help".)

I'd bet that the PLA is less developed than the US armed forces enough that the casualty rate would be much higher if they were in Afghanistan or Iraq. The US should contract the PLA to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. Kill 2 birds with one stone.
I agree that the ec2 is more expensive but...
What are your alternatives?
If you are signing contracts to get a deal, it sounds like you are price conscious. You should see in comments above where I spec out the needs for a typical website. However, Assuming you only need 1.2ghz of single core processing power and nobody needs to visit your website, ec2 is perfect.

It only starts sucking when you actually have to serve files and do it quickly.
I'm betting that someone will prove a TANSTAAFL theorem for Quantum computing. In other words, you might be able to factor in polynomial steps, but each step will take time proportional to the size of your Hilbert space.
Dedicated, Colo, Other VPS's if you must.

Shop around.
Thanks! It's always nice to know that things like this are appreciated.
To some extent, everything is a quantum computer; the problem is entering in the program and how accurately you can read out the answer. If I understand correctly, the scientific advance reported is just doing the first part.
Most servers sold from either provider come with 1-2TB of bandwidth. How much does 2TB of bandwidth cost on amazon again? Right.

340 dollars. If 340 dollars matter in your equation then I think we're talking about different things here.

I only said EC2 /in my mind/ is not worth it

Actually you come across like talking ultimo, just like in your next sentence...

If you have a static need for a server- As in, a webserver that will always be on, Then you are better off getting a dedicated.

See? That sentence simply doesn't work in that general form. If you have a need for a single webserver then yes, EC2 is probably not cost effective (although it can be even there, depending on the use-case). Once you're talking about a deployment with multiple servers the picture changes. Not always in the favor of Amazon but often enough to refute such a general statement.

Looking at it again it seems like all your arguments come from the angle of renting a single server. - In that light you make some sense. But please also see that amazon starts to make a lot of sense in the mid-range and up, in many situations.
I'm surprised this didn't get more discussion. Why not?
The realization that philosophy is a dead end is vary common and vary old.

Thomas Aquinas spent much of his life using the bible to make a hole host of philosophic treaties based on the infallibility of the bible. Then he realized that his entire work up to that point was "a house built on sand" and that for example trying to prove the existence of god basses on biblical teachings was pointless. He died in 1274.

He is not all that well known for making that realization, but if you actually read his work it becomes obvious that in his latter work he understood christian philosophy was simply a game he was vary good at. You can study fad's and paint a superficial picture of the development of philosophy but looking at what was published and what was popular does not in any way tell you when an idea was first conceived.

PS: I was 3 years old when I asked my mother why people believe in God. Not "is there a god" but why do people delude themselves. As a christian she defended faith, but I had already decided it was BS. So I assume a significant number of people throughout history quietly called the popular fictions of the day BS, and went about their lives. Suggesting that we needed philosophy to separate some truth from fiction seems pretentious when there is an ancient tradition of "losing the faith".
Does FreeBSD accept donations in picodollars?
Define exercise regularly?
I did state in the very first post that hourly billing is the only asset. Thats why its perfect for overflow. I can spin up a double extra large and use it for a few hours when I need it, and kill it afterwards. Thats it though.

I use r1soft for redundancy and the costs for that are nominal. That sort of handles any hardware issues for me. I can get back up and running in about 10 minutes from a catastrophic failure.

All the stuff you mention below really doesnt matter to me, and I cant imagine it matters that much to many people. All these tests you mention could easily be done off site, or mirrored to run locally.

Still not worth paying 3-4x for these random "abilitys"

For things that matter- Bandwidth, Processing Power, Ram- Dedicated servers have EC2 Beat, hands down. More power, Less cost.
Although the content of the article is interesting, I don't like how the author is basically concluding: Because the one-child policy is introducing dynamics that are different from the past, it's dangerous.

Most things are not any different from those currently experienced by western countries: declining fertility rate, aging population, etc. The only thing that's really in the unfamiliar territory is the male:female ratio imbalance.

What would really have been unprecedented was if the one-child policy was not implemented and population kept growing unabated. I personally think there would be alot of social problems had this been the case.
A cow-orker of mine (now at Google) moved to Dragon Naturally Speaking, and also became a product manager. He changed from writing code to writing specs and emails.

It seemed to work out, though he was a good writer of prose to begin with.
It may be a less useful technique to improve programming skills when you are well versed in different kinds of languages but it could be argued that what you are striving for with your projects in different fields can be achieved when someone who has programmed for 5 years in java and only java goes and learns how to do substantial things in a language like haskell.
Google PageRank in MATLAB [pdf]
For obvious reasons the PS3 can't directly play pirated mkv files, which is the target use (albeit tacitly) for many of these streaming boxes.
As stated in my other comments I'm mostly coming in from the angle of bigger deployments (3+ hosts) here.

That's where EC2 starts to make sense - not always, but often.

For your site, without knowing the details, I have no doubt that you made a sound decision. You should just be open to revisit that decision once it grows to a point where a few hundred bucks difference a month don't weigh as much anymore. Or rather, where the added flexibility makes that difference worthwhile. - That's all I was trying to say.
From what I understand, if both mother and father are single children - there actually is a two-child policy in action
There is no male/female imbalance in countries where the birth rate went below the replacement level naturally. That's a major problem that China will have to face, and not the other countries mentioned.
Sudoku in MATLAB [pdf]
"Acquiring Rights" for DVD rentals is vastly easier than getting the streaming rights to HD content.